Jacob Monk (August 25, 1805 - October 8, 1893) was a Baltimore and Philadelphia based American publisher of wall, pocket, and case format maps active in the mid-19th century. Monk was born in Stoughton, Massachusetts. It is not clear when he moved to Philadelphia, but he was active there from about 1850, when he began a lucrative publishing career, to 1857, or so. By the standards of American map publishers, Monk was exceedingly successful due to his strategy of employing a national network of door-to-door salesmen to promote and sell his wall map. Monk maps, thus, are in general more widely distributed than those of his competitors. He married New Yorker Charlotte M. French (Monk; 1823 - 1903) around 1851. He is also the founder, in 1856, of the Mount Vernon Cemetery. Sometime in the 1860s, Monk acquired some 44 acres of land on the Schuylkill River, just outside of Philadelphia, setting himself up as a gentleman farmer.
