NORTH AMERICA: A NEW GAZETTEER OR GEOGRAPHICAL DICTIONARY OF NORTH AMERICA AND THE WEST INDIES. 1838. BISHOP DAVENPORT. CD-WIN/MACAuthor: Bishop Davenport
Pages: map and 537
Pub. Date: (1838) 2008
Gazetteers can be useful tools providing researchers with the location of long extinct places or descriptions of what still extant places were like at an earlier time. They also frequently contain additional items of interest in the hope of enticing purchases. Davenport’s Gazetteer includes lists of current benevolent societies, colleges, theological and medical schools and British slave colonies in the West Indies as well as lists of principle roads with the mileage between towns and routes of steamboats and principle canals and railroads (finished or in progress) giving their length and consequently allowing us to determine whether they might have served as a migration route for our ancestors. Statistical tables provide economic and population information based on the 1830 census. In the first section, a presentation on each state in the United States includes a description of the first settlement, the number of presses, the number of each of the various religious congregations, a table of counties and county towns, a brief description of the governing bodies, and an overview of the geography and economic status.
Half of the volume is dedicated to an alphabetical listing of geographical places with some limited to a simple identification of the geographic location, i.e., ACTON, t[own] Windham co. Vt.; 33 SSW Windsor. Pop. 245. Others, contain more complex descriptions: ABINGDON, t[own] and cap.[i.e., courthouse] Washington co., Va.; 320 [miles] WSW. Richmond, from W[ashington, D.C.]. 404 m. Lat. 36 37' N. It is a considerable town, and contains a court-house, a jail, a market-house, an academy, and a Presbyterian church. Here is a remarkable cave. An “Addenda for 1838” adds an additional 65 pages of geographical place names and descriptions where one learns that Akron, Ohio, has a population of 1000 and there is an ALABAMA SETTLEMENT, in the NE part of Union co. Illinois. (An apparent earlier 1838 edition with 19 fewer pages titled this section “Corrections and Additions.”) The coverage of place names is uneven with Georgia having only a little over a 100 while Ohio tops 1200. But the value is not in the numbers, but in whether a place being sought is listed (Sandy Hook, a village in Culpeper County, Virginia, appears in Davenport, but is not found in Martin’s 1835 Virginia Gazetteer) and, if so, the depth and detail of the description. Although the bulk of the descriptions are of cities and towns, capes, islands, lakes, rivers and other geographical features are also listed.
A large hand-colored map of the United States and portions of Canada and Mexico is also included.
Summary by Barbara Vines Little, CG
for Archive CD Books USA
The CD includes high-quality images of every page as originally published (not just a transcript) and is fully searchable using Adobe Acrobat Reader (version 5 or later recommended) on any Windows, Macintosh, or Unix computer. The data on this CD is completely self-contained, and requires no installation.
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| Item Number: | 113-us0350 |
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