1849 Goldthwait Railroad Map of New England

Jonathan Hale Goldthwait (May 21, 1811 - January 26, 1870) was an American engraver and publisher. Born in Longmeadow, Massachusetts, to Hannah and Erastus Goldthwait, he went to Boston to apprentice with a bank note engraver at the age of seventeen in 1828. He stayed in Boston until at least March 1834. He resurfaced in Springfield, Massachusetts, where he engraved a wall map of Springfield for his cousin George Colton (1793 - 1839). Charlotte Goldthwaite, in her genealogy of the Goldthwaite family, described Jonathan Hale Goldthwait as 'an artist in temperament, possessing a very intuitive sense of the beautiful and of the incongruous, and his fine taste and excellent judgment in such matters were very much sought and valued'. Another genealogy describes Goldthwait in this manner, 'He was a man of fine artistic temperament, a very expert copper-plate map engraver, and without an equal in the branches of small lettering and cutting 'rippled water', both as to rapidity and effect. He was also a good musician, and for many years played upon the organ in some leading church, where he was at the time residing.' Goldthwait married Susan Loud Joy on November 17, 1840, with whom he had three children. More by this mapmaker...