A Treatise on Maps (1956)
By: John E. Adams
Tags: Maps, History, Vermont, GIS

It’s odd about names on maps… Clark’s Pond in Glover, for example, where everybody in town calls it Tildy’s Pond and always has. Questions such as this fall to the lot of the Board of Geographic Names, a relatively obscure unit amid Vermont’s myriad bureaus, whose duty it is (without cost to the State) to determine the proper names for such hills, valleys, mountains and ponds as are subject to ambiguity. The Board tries to follow local wishes, not always easy when one faction may favor “Crystal Lake” and another holds to “Dead Horse Swamp.”

The source of much odd nomenclature on Vermont maps is unknown. We can only guess that early mappers must have grown desperate for names to apply to crossroads, hills and mountains. But private mapmakers today such as the oil companies, have little touches of their own to discourage piracy, and in time puzzle historians. Basing their maps on Federal and State highway maps — and welcome to — these private map men sometimes make some very insignificant mistake or misspell a hamlet. It may be intentional. For if another firm appropriates the map and repeats the secret error, the proof of piracy is pretty convincing.

Vermont’s Highway Department to whose Supervisor of Mapping, Emerson Baker, we are indebted for our current proficiency on this subject — is in the process of remapping the counties, now in a scale of an inch per half-mile. Addison and Bennington counties will be ready first. County maps are the best for back road touring.

Town maps (238 of them plus eight cities, 66 villages and 13 “urban compact” areas) will be revised and remapped when the counties are completed. Like the county maps they’ll show all houses, farms, etc. except in urban areas. The old county, town and village maps are still available, as well as the Tourist, State Highway, Traffic, Road Condition and Covered Bridge maps. Write the Vermont Highway Department, Montpelier, for map list and prices, which are modest.

Early map surveying, Mr. Baker reports, was sometimes done uphill and down, with no compensation or projection to a common plane. As a result a lot of boundary lines actually overlapped. Probably Vermont was supposed to start on the 42° 45' parallel and stop on the 45th, but someone miscued and we came out with sizeable dividends at each end. The humps in Vermont’s Canadian border probably were due to inaccurate compass readings, caused by magnetic disturbances there. The state’s east and west boundaries weren’t fixed until much later. In fact it wasn’t until 1934 that New Hampshire finally won title to the Connecticut River (and thereby also won the privilege of building the bridges across it.)

Much mapping today is done from aerial photos and these are available showing the whole State. They were and are being made by some 15 different agencies, and the varying sources and scales are so confusing that we advise the following for anyone wanting an air view of his property: Go to the nearest Soil Conservation District office and from their files locate the sheet that covers your place. Then you can order from the appropriate source.

One of the newest wrinkles in mapping is the plastic contour relief map put out by the Army Map Service, Corps of Engineers, Washington (at about $4 a sheet). The scale is about one inch to four miles with the elevations exaggerated about three times, so it looks as though one couldn’t find room in all Vermont to level a billiard table. Two sheets are now ready, including all of Vermont north to near Middlebury.

Probably the most generally useful and detailed maps are the U.S. Geological Survey sheets, stocked by several Vermont bookstores or available from the USGS, Map Information Office in Washington. The inch-to-a-mile maps (there are other scales but they don’t as yet blanket Vermont), measure 15 minutes of latitude by 15 minutes of longitude. Latitude is about 17 ½ miles wide while longitude varies. On the Canadian border 15 minutes is about 12 ½ miles, while near Brattleboro it’s nearly 13 miles. Any cartographer can explain this to you in a few hours.