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Rare early map of Montgomery County, Ohio, published by David Baker & Samuel Morrison in Cincinnati in 1833.
The map is colored by townships and shows early roads, towns, mills, rivers, etc. A town grid for Dayton, Ohio is shown on the Miami River, along with some early handwritten annotations.
The map also shows the Dayton-Cincinnati Canal, which was Dayton began construction in 1827 to aid the transport goods from Dayton to Cincinnati. The canal provided the main source of growth for Dayton and Montgomery County during the period, with the population of the county increasing by over 50% between 1820 and 1830.
The map was printed by Doolittle & Munson in 1833, only two years after the printing of their earliest known map in Cincinnati. It is apparently one of the two earliest printed maps of any county in Ohio, along with Wyllys Buell's map of Muskingum County (1833). Willis (or Wyllys) Buell (1790 - November 1851) was a native of Connecticut and third mayor of Atlanta. He was the first Justice of the Peace of the 1026th militia district and was said to be a talented portrait painter. He was a member of the Free and Rowdy Party. At the time of the publication of the map, he was a resident of Zanesville, Ohio (apparently a lawyer), where he remained until at least 1839. He may have been related to Abel Buell.
The map is of the utmost rarity. We note only a copy in the Midland Catalog of 1943 (priced at $20 and described as "one of the earliest of Ohio County maps, very rare." OCLC locates no copies of the map, although the map does appear in Philips and was apparently reproduced by the Dayton Historical Society in 1945.
