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From the First Atlas of South Carolina and the First State Atlas in U.S. History.
A detailed map of the Spartanburg District in South Carolina, surveyed by C. Vignoles and H. Ravenel, and engraved by H.S Tanner "& Assistants". This map, prepared for inclusion in Rober Mills' Atlas Of The State Of South Carolina..., depicts the district with extraordinary precision, including its rivers, roads, taverns, churches, mills, furnaces, forges and bridges. Prince's Old Fort and Timmon's Old Fort are shown, as is at least 1 doctor and a Cotton Factory, along with a number of Post Offices.
In his landmark work on 19th-century American cartography, American Maps and Mapmakers, Walter Ristow describes the Mills Atlas of South Carolina as ‘A significant first in American cartography.’ He devotes an entire chapter to this production, the only native atlas to bear this distinction. This atlas preceded by four years the state-sponsored atlases of Maine and New York, by Moses Greenleaf and David Burr respectively. There would not be another state atlas for 35 years and those would be commercial, not state-instigated, publications.
The history of the mapping of South Carolina in the early years of the 19th century shows the intractable intertwining of production of the Mills atlas and John Wilson’s map of the state published in 1822. Many of the same district surveys were used for both, but Mills redrafted these maps for inclusion in his atlas. Ristow recounts the full history of the atlas, as does the introduction to the 1980 reprint of the atlas published by the Southern Historical Press.
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