1847 Sidney and Smith Map of Philadelphia (Ten Miles Around)

On the cover of Ristow's 'Maps and Mapmakers.'

This is an attractive example of J. C. Sidney's 1847 map of Philadelphia, covering the city and its vicinity 'Ten Miles round'. Smith, the publisher, considered this one of the 'most successful of his maps'. Water Ristow, in American Maps and Mapmakers, placed this map on the cover, devoted a full-page illustration to it, and included several pages of text, underscoring its significance as an example of mid-19th-century American map publishing. Indeed, its producers were a who's who of Philadelphia map publishing: Robert Persall Smith, Norman Friend, Augustus Köllner, Peter Steven Duval, and James Charles Sidney.

A Closer Look

As the title suggests, coverage centers on Philadelphia and extends 10 miles around in all directions. The map is oriented to the Northeast, so the Delaware River runs roughly crosswise through the center. The unusual orientation choice means that Philadelphia's streets, which run in an approximate east-west-north-south grid, are here set at a 45° angle.

The map features granular local detail, naming property holders, major and minor roads, topography, civic institutions (such as schools and railroads), and more.

In the lower left and right, there are engraved vignettes of Girard College and Laurel Hill Cemetery - both locations were significant to John Jay Smith (the publisher), who was a supporter of the college and cofounder of the cemetery.

Publication History and Census

This map was drawn by the Civil Engineer J. C. Sidney, with the Delaware County portions attributed to Joshua Ash, who surveyed a large contemporaneous map of that area. Publication and copyright are tied to Robert Pearsall Smith. It was engraved by Norman Friend and printed by Peter Steven Duval. Despite the attribution to R. P. Smith, contemporaneous correspondence suggests that the map was actually published by his father, John Jay Smith. John Jay likely financially supported his son in the early days of his publishing career. The vignette engravings in the corners are the work of Augustus Köllner. This map is rare. A full census is impossible as the map has been populated through OCLC with countless digital holdings after a single example. We see no recent market history.

Cartographers

James Charles Sidney (1819 – April 27, 1881) was an English-American architect, civil engineer, surveyor, and landscape architect based in Philadelphia. Sidney was born in England and emigrated to the United States, settling in Philadelphia, around 1840. His first cartographic works appear in the late 1840s when he partnered with Robert Pearsall Smith to survey several new large format maps of the Philadelphia region. In the 1849 Philadelphia Directory, he appears as a civil engineer and by c. 1850, he had established a partnership with the architect James P. W. Neff, Sidney and Neff, located at 80 Walnut Street. Around this time, he also published his most important work on architecture, American Cottage and Villa Architecture . The partnership with Neff dissolved c. 1854. It may have been because he was neglecting the architecture business to procures more maps for Smith, including the 1852 Map of the City and Vicinity of Boston. After 1854 he briefly relocated to New York to participate in Smith's mapping of that state. He returned to Philadelphia in 1857 forming a partnership with Andrew Adams, an architect and surveyor. During this time he completed a masterplan for Philadelphia's Fairmont Park, which was adopted and approved by the city council in 1859. The partnership with Adams dissolved one year later in 1860. In 1864 he took a new partner, Frederick C. Merry, founding Sidney and Merry, which continued the work on Fairmont Park and later Chestnut Hill. From 1865, Sidney worked independently and spent the rest of his careers designing schools for the Controllers of the Public Schools of Philadelphia. He became a member of the American Institute of Architects in 1870. Sidney's initials are often misrepresented on maps as J. G. and/or F. C.   Further Details...

Robert Pearsall Smith (February 1, 1827 - April 17, 1898) was an American map maker active in Philadelphia from the middle to late 19th century. Smith was born to a Quaker family in Philadelphia, all librarians and publishers. Robert Pearsall originally ran a law bookstore at 19 James Street, Philadelphia. It was not until 1846 that Smith began producing maps in collaboration with this father, John Jay Smith (1798 - 1881), and brother, Lloyd P. Smith (1822 - 1886). One year earlier, in 1845, John Jay, then librarian at the Library Company of Philadelphia and Loganian Library, acquired the American rights to the anastatic process of transfer lithography. In February of 1846 he and his two sons founded the Anastatic Office, a printing concern based on the anastatic process located at 317 Market Street, Philadelphia. The Anastatic Office produced numerous copies and reissues of historic documents and maps from the Library Company's collection before being dissolved in 1847. In the same year Robert Pearsall opened a printing establishment under his own name at 144 Chestnut Street. In 1858, he joined forced with the Swiss-American engraver Frederick Bourquin (1808 - 1897) under the imprint 'F. Bourquin and Company' (602 Chestnut Street). Smith retired suddenly and inexplicably from the printing business around 1865. Smith was also deeply religious, a lay leader in the Holiness Movement in the United States and the Higher Life Movement in Great Britain. In 1873, Smith and his wife, Hannah Tatum Whitall (1832 - 1911), crossed the Atlantic to preach in England, Germany and Switzerland. They returned in 1875, preaching in Brighton, where Smith supposedly had an affair with an American writer. In, 1888, his entire family moved to England.   Further Details...

Norman Friend (1814 - February 25, 1888) was a Danish-American lithographer and engraver, specializing in map work. Friend was born in Denmark and emigrated to the United States in 1844, settling in Philadelphia. He was certainly a citizen by 1851, at which point he served as the citizenship sponsor to Jacob Aub, with whom he partnered in the firm of Friend and Aub. After Aub's departure to the military in 1861, Friend continued to operate at the address under his own name until his death. Friend and Aub executed maps for many publishers, including Walling, McIntyre, Bridges, Smith, and Otley.   Further Details...

Augustus Theodore Frederick Köllner (1812 - December 10, 1906) was an artist, engraver, and lithographer based in Philadelphia. Born in Wurttemberg, Germany, Köllner began his career in Germany, working as a book illustrator in Stuttgart and Paris in the late 1820s and 1830s before immigrating to the United States in 1839. After settling in Washington, D.C., Köllner worked as a lithographer for the Haas firm, working on advertisements, bank notes, and city views. He moved to Philadelphia in 1840 and tried unsuccessfully to establish himself as a portrait painter. After this misstep, Köllner became the second chief artist of P.S. Duval and William Huddy's 'U.S. Military Magazine' (1839 - 1842). Throughout the 1840s, Köllner worked as a lithographer for many different Philadelphia based lithographic firms, including Duval, J.T. Bowen, Frederick Kuhl, Thomas Sinclair, and Wagner and McGuigan. Between 1847 and 1848, Köllner began working for the lithographic firm Brechemin and Camp, for whom he designed all genres of lithographs and advertised his own lithographic views based on his annual summer sketching trips along the East Coast. His work also began to be published in the seminal series 'View of American Cities', published between 1848 and 1851 by Goupil, Vibert, and Company. While working for Brechemin and Camp, Köllner was responsible for creating the multi-foot Dripp's map of New York City. Kollner established his own firm in 1851 and worked on a wide range of projects, including advertisements, labels, city and landscape views, and maps. During the Civil War, Köllner enlisted in the cavalry in 1863 and later sold photographic reproductions of the etchings he did as a soldier. He produced his last series of landscape lithographs entitled 'Bits of Nature' in 1878, but focused mostly on his watercolor work during the late 1870s. Köllner retired in the early 1880s, but continued to make sketching trips around the Philadelphia area. Köllner married Mary Sheek (c. 1821 - 1899) in 1843, and they had several children, three of which survived infancy: William, Clara, and Josephine. Köllner died on December 10, 1906.   Further Details...

Peter Stephen Duval (1804 - February 8, 1886) was a prominent French-American Philadelphia lithographer. He immigrated to Philadelphia from France in 1831 to take a job as a lithographer at the Philadelphia firm of Cephas Childs (Childs and Inman), one of Philadelphia's first commercial lithographing firms. In 1834, Childs retired and Duval took over the business with the artist George Lehman, operating as Lehman and Duval. Duval bought out Lehman in 1837 and from that point forward operated as P. S. Duval's Lithographic Establishment, or just Duval's Establishment. In the 1840s, he became one of the first firms to introduce steam powered lithographic presses. In 1841 he became a naturalized U.S citizen. At one point he had over 30 pressers and employed one 70 artists and was one Philadelphia's largest lithographic printer. Over the course of the next 30 years, Duval would have several business partners including the Swiss-American engravers Charles and Frederick Bourquin (1808 - 1897). In 1857 his son Steven C. Duval joined the business. Peter Duval retired in 1869 but continued to be involved in his company until his death from an enlarged heart in 1886. Duval was a member of the local branches of the Freemasons and the Order of Odd Fellows in addition to being president of the Philadelphia's Lithographers' Association.   Further Details...

Condition

Good. Even overall toning. Some edgewear and loss. A few stains near the center. Dissected and laid down on original linen, which, despite some wear, is mostly stable.

References

Ristow, W., American Maps and Mapmakers:  Commercial Cartography in the Nineteenth Century, p. 344 - 346. OCLC 55770145. Rumsey 4688.001.