The map collection has been assembled to document the expansion of geographical knowledge of the Americas from the fifteenth through the nineteenth centuries, with particular strengths in North American military history, frontier expansion, and the history of cartography itself. Among the 600 atlases and roughly 30,000 maps in the collection is virtually every printed map relating to the United States before 1820, either in original copy or photostat. These holdings include 1,500 manuscript maps and an equal number of photostats of manuscript maps from other repositories throughout the world. The Map Division also houses an exceptional collection of bibliographies, promotional and state survey maps of the nineteenth century, and county atlases of the 1870s and 1880s. The Library maintains an active program of acquisitions through gifts and purchase.It has long been the policy of the Library to catalog every map relating to the Americas, whether it is held as a separate or bound into an atlas or book. The existing card catalog is available at the Library but is also currently being converted to make it accessible on-line. A small percentage of the collection is now searchable in MIRLYN, the on-line catalog of the University of Michigan. Maps may be found by author, title, geographic location, or by a limited number of subject headings. The subject heading "Maps shelf" will display all maps currently included in MIRLYN. Manuscript maps are accessible under the subject heading "Brun Guide."
History of the Division
The Map Division has a distinguished tradition, not only because of the richness of its holdings in printed and manuscript maps, but also as one of the first map collections to be treated as a serious historical resource. The Division came into formal existence in 1931 as a result of acquisitions of outstanding map resources during the previous decade.
Essentially a book collector before the Library opened in 1923, William L. Clements had acquired several notable atlases and some exceedingly rare maps bound into books relating to the period of American discovery and exploration. However it was the fortuitous purchase in 1923-24 of the entire 50,000 volume library of Henry Vignaud, an American expatriate scholar of the Discovery Period, which established the Clements as an outstanding cartographic repository. The Vignaud Collection included almost all editions of the great atlases of the fifteenth through eighteenth centuries by Ptolemy, Mercator, Blaeu, Ortelius, and other Italian, Dutch, German and French map makers. Simultaneously, Mr. Clements purchased en bloc the unsurpassed collection of printed maps of the American Revolution that had been assembled by the London bookselling firm of Henry Stevens.
Shortly after the Library opened, Mr. Clements turned his attention to acquiring manuscript collections of British military and political figures active in American affairs between the 1750s and 1780s. Among his greatest acquisitions were the papers of Generals Thomas Gage and Henry Clinton, Lord Shelburne, and Lord George Germain. With each of these massive collections came hundreds of individual manuscript and printed maps of the American colonies, frontier fortifications, and battle plans from the French and Indian and Revolutionary Wars. These collections became a part of the Library's holdings with the settlement of the Clements estate in 1937.
Throughout the 1920s, the Clements also systematically collected photostats of American maps in European archives, and added photostats of the Erskine Maps collection at the New-York Historical Society and manuscript maps in the collections of Henry E. Huntington. By the mid-1930s, the Clements had become the pre-eminent collection of American maps of the eighteenth century, and was among the finest general resources for the history of cartography in the world.
The Map Division has been served by an succession of exceptionally capable curators, including J. Clements Wheat, Lloyd Brown, George Kish, and Chris Brun. Nat Shipton, Curator in the late 1960s, performed the remarkable feat of cataloguing all American maps in printed books, and he was succeeded first by Douglas Marshall, an expert on military cartography, by David Bosse, who devoted particular attention to the maps of the Civil War, and Mary Pedley, an expert in French cartography of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. The current curator, Brian Dunnigan, is a specialist in military cartography of the eighteenth century. The Clements and its Maps Curators have published numerous articles, monographs, and bibliographies which have made significant contributions to the field of the history of maps.
References:
Two printed guides to the manuscript map holdings at the Clements are available:
- Adams, Randolph G. British headquarters maps and sketches used by Sir Henry Clinton... (Ann Arbor, 1928)
- Brun, Christian. Guide to the manuscript maps in the William L. Clements Library (Ann Arbor, 1959)
Printed maps are described in:
- Marshall, Douglas W., ed. Research catalog of maps on North America to 1860 in the William L. Clements Library, 4 vols. (Boston, 1972)
A comprehensive bibliography of maps printed in America before 1800 was compiled using the collections at the Clements, supplemented with photostats from other institutions:
- Wheat, James Clements and Christian F. Brun. Maps and charts published in America before 1800, 2nd rev. ed. (London, 1985)
Return to:
 Home |  Collections |  Staff |  History |  Regulations |
[ Books ][ Manuscripts ][ Music ][ Photographs ][ Prints ][ Reader info ][ Women's History ]