nated by the French with a few English
colonies. Henry Popple produced “A Map of the
British Empire in America” circa 1734 that shows just the
opposite.
At about the time the streets of Edo
(Tokyo) were being mapped in great detail, European mapmakers
were documenting and trying to understand the discoveries that
were being made in America and elsewhere in the world. In
1675, five years before the Edo map, Arent Roggeveen produced a
navigation chart of Chesapeake Bay. We forget that it was
not just the English, French, and Spanish who were exploring
North America. The Dutch were navigating the coast and
colonizing as well. These maps can take us back in time
and show us what was happening at opposite ends of the Earth.
Finally, there is a panorama of Richmond
drawn by George Cooke and published by Lewis Clover in Philadelphia
in 1834. It shows a park like riverfront with elegantly
dressed people with top hat and parasol gazing at a rolling
landscape that has equal numbers of stately Jeffersonian
buildings and cattle. This is undoubtedly exactly the
experience in downtown Richmond today, especially at rush hour.
ALAN VOORHEES
Alan Voorhees is an engineer and
transportation consultant who planned most of the metropolitan
and local transportation systems built in the free world in the
1960s and 70s. He was a mapmaker himself in World War
Two, making maps of underwater approaches to beaches as a
member of the Underwater Demolition Team. He has numerous
academic credentials.
Alan Voorhees and his wife Nathalie
received the 2000 Philanthropy Award from the Library of
Virginia Foundation. The South Reading Room of the
Library, where the maps are stored, is named for Nathalie.
Not content to just donate maps and
historic books and atlases, Alan has also been a generous
supporter of efforts to make these and other documents
available to the public. He was a primary supporter of Virginia
in Maps: Four Centuries of Settlement, Growth, and Development,
published by the Library in 2000. He has supported the
Library’s records management program and a cooperative
effort of the Library, the Library of Congress, and the
Virginia Historical Society to scan Civil War maps in each
institution’s collection and to host the scans on the
Web.
Mr. Voorhees has been collecting
maps since the 1970s. His first acquisition, “A New
and Accurate Chart of the Bay of Chesapeake” by Anthony
Smith in 1777, is now part of the Library’s collection.
LIBRARY OF VIRGINIA
The Library of Virginia was created in
1823 to organize and care for the state’s collection of
books and records, many of which date to the earliest days of
the colony. The Library not only preserves, but also
provides access to 91 million manuscript items from four
centuries of Virginia’s history.
The map collection of the Library,
in which the Voorhees collection now resides, originally came
from the materials acquired for official use in the seventeenth
and eighteenth centuries. Some of the maps were printed
separately, but many are found in reports, letters, and
petitions.
The map collection contains more than
60,000 items that are stunning in their complexity.
Perhaps one of the more interesting maps is one drawn in
1612 by Captain John Smith himself. There are also state
maps produced by the Virginia Board of Public Works in 1827 and
1859 that show the extent of development at the time.
LAST WORDS
The people of Virginia, the nation,
and scholars everywhere are indebted to Alan Voorhees and David
Rumsey for sharing their collections. Here in Virginia,
the Voorhees collection at the Library of Virginia ensures that
the maps will remain in the public domain and accessible to
everyone.
Not only are these maps space and time
machines, they are also beautiful and fun to look at. Go
to www.lva.lib.va.us and enjoy! 
For more information:
Larry Stipek
Loudoun County
GIS Coordinator
GIS Coordinator
P.O. Box 7000
1 Harrison St., SE, 2nd Fl.
Leesburg, VA 20177
(703) 777-0558
LSTIPEK@loudoun.gov