1846 Chart of Green Bay
DESCRIPTION
A rare and highly detailed government-issued nautical chart of Green Bay and the Door County Peninsula region, this map was compiled from hydrographic surveys conducted in 1845 under the direction of Captain W. G. Williams of the U.S. Topographical Engineers and published in Washington in 1846. Issued only two years before Wisconsin achieved statehood, the chart documents the western Great Lakes during a formative period of commercial expansion, military surveying, and frontier settlement.
The chart carefully records hundreds of soundings throughout Green Bay while identifying shoals, reefs, anchorages, sandbars, and channels critical to navigation. Early frontier settlements including Green Bay, Bay Settlement, and communities near the mouth of the Fox River appear sparsely distributed along the shoreline, reflecting the region before large-scale urban and industrial development. Sturgeon Bay, Little Sturgeon Bay, Eagle Harbor, Bailey’s Harbor, Washington Island, and numerous smaller islands and inlets along the Door Peninsula are rendered in remarkable detail.
Particularly notable is the inset titled “Profile of the Dividing Ridge at Sturgeon Portage,” illustrating the narrow land divide separating the waters of Green Bay from Lake Michigan. The inclusion of this profile reflects growing federal interest in transportation improvements and possible navigational connections through the Door Peninsula decades before later harbor and canal projects transformed the region. Produced shortly after the Black Hawk War and during the opening years of American settlement in Wisconsin Territory, the chart captures Green Bay at a transitional moment when the fur trade economy was gradually giving way to commercial shipping, lumbering, and migration into the upper Midwest.
Examples of the chart are institutionally scarce, with recorded holdings including the Library of Congress and the Wisconsin Historical Society. The map appears only infrequently on the antiquarian market and remains an important early survey of Wisconsin’s Great Lakes frontier.
CONDITION
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