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A foundational survey of Portland, Maine, executed by civil engineer James Hall in 1837, and the first large-format printed plan of the city produced under municipal charter. Commissioned by the city council, Hall’s map documents Portland at a critical moment, just five years after it ceased to be the state capital and during a period of rapid geographic and infrastructural expansion across Munjoy and Bramhall Hills.

The map presents a carefully surveyed view of the Portland peninsula, bounded by the Fore River and Back Cove, with every street labeled and many important public buildings outlined. The commercial spine of the city, Congress, Middle, Federal, and Fore Streets, is drawn in tight detail, and two dozen piers along the waterfront (Union, Central, Long, Merrill’s, etc.) are shown extending into Casco Bay. Though the Back Cove shoreline is omitted beyond the limits of Portland proper, Hall includes key roads in Westbrook that connected the urban peninsula to outlying land.

A reference index at lower right lists 29 buildings and institutions, prioritizing religious denominations, public buildings, and key economic sites. These include First, Second, and Third Parish Meeting Houses; Baptist, Methodist, Universalist, and Abyssinian churches; St. Paul’s, Friends’, and the Roman Catholic Church; along with the State House, Custom House, Market, Court House and Jail, Exchange, and multiple engine houses and schoolhouses. In later variants of the map, a 30th reference appears for the New Jerusalem Society.

Though visually simple, the map is rich in technical ambition. Hall includes both true and magnetic north. The scale bar features fine transversals, borrowed from engineering practice, to allow for precise measurement. His choice to tilt the peninsula slightly upward on the sheet (rather than orienting it due north) suggests a practical accommodation to format.

Prepared by Moore’s Lithography in Boston, Hall’s Plan was among the earliest large-format Maine maps printed using lithography, then understood as a means of creating “multiplied originals” rather than reproductions. It was not made for sale, but rather for official use—essentially a blueprint before the era of blueprinting. Today, it survives in very limited numbers. Most known copies show signs of in-house use, with manuscript annotations or updates added by later engineers such as Alexander Wadsworth Longfellow.

Hall himself remains a central figure in Portland’s early infrastructure. A trained civil engineer, he was responsible for laying out Portland’s Western Cemetery and worked extensively on early railroad surveys, including the Portland, Saco & Portsmouth line (1836) and the Portland–Montreal route (1844). Other surviving manuscript plans by Hall, such as his 1840 and 1843 surveys for the Deering family, are also preserved at the Maine Historical Society.