|
||
|
|
|
|
Issued at the height of New Hampshire’s railroad boom, Dodge’s wall map is among the very few nineteenth-century state maps both compiled and published in New Hampshire. Printed in Nashua and engraved by L. H. Bradford & Co. of Boston, it combines up-to-date township boundaries with an unusually detailed portrayal of existing and projected rail lines.
The map is hand colored by county and includeds townships, roads, and watercourses. A long explanatory key deciphers eight line styles distinguishing completed railroads, lines under construction, and those merely chartered. Dodge inserts a large statistical panel giving, by county, population (1850 Census), assessed valuation, acreage in farms, number of manufacturing establishments, and more.
Heavy black lines trace the finished lines of the Concord, Northern, and Boston & Maine systems, converging in the Merrimack River corridor where steam power was fuelling the rapid rise of Manchester and Nashua. Other lines push north toward the White Mountains and west toward Vermont, graphic evidence of the speculative fervor that gripped the state’s rail promoters after 1848.
A bold ornamental border frames four steel-engraved vignettes: Portsmouth Harbour and the State House at Concord on the right, balanced on the left by bustling industrial views of Manchester (Amoskeag Mills) and Nashua—visually contrasting the state’s traditional mercantile centres with its emergent manufacturing hubs.
Dodge issued at least four states of the map (two in 1854 alone, followed by editions in 1856 and 1860) to keep pace with the fast-moving rail network. Surviving copies are scarce: OCLC lists examples only at Phillips Exeter Academy, Yale, and Dartmouth. The map stands as Jacob R. Dodge’s sole cartographic publication, predating his long tenure as Chief Statistician at the U.S. Department of Agriculture, and offers a snapshot of New Hampshire at the moment modern transport was knitting its rural townships into an industrialized, data-conscious commonwealth.
