New Jersey
Cartographer:
Sotzmann, Daniel Friedrich & Eberling, Christoph Daniel
Date of Creation:
1797
Sotzmann’s exceptionally rare map of New Jersey, published in the Ebeling-Sotzmann “Atlas Von Nordamerika” designed to accompany Ebeling's 7 volume “Erdbeschreibung und Geschichte von Amerika, die vereinten Staaten Von Amerika”. The independence of the United States created a desire for information about the new republic in Europe as well as in America and Ebeling’s grand atlas was “one of the most comprehensive, detailed, and sympathetic geographic descriptions of America” (Ristow).
Sotzmann is known to have completed only 10 maps of an intended 18, including Vermont, New Hampshire, Connecticut and Massachusetts in 1796; Rhode Island, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, and Maryland & Delaware (on a single sheet) in 1797; Maine in 1798; and New York in 1799. Complete sets of all 10 maps are very rare, and only a handful of institutions hold them, including the LOC and Harvard. “This series, thus, is among the rarest of cartographic Americana for the closing decade of the 18th-century” (Ristow, page 176).
Using as his sources contemporary maps by Carey, Blodget, Belknap, Howell, Carleton, De Witt, Griffith, and others, Sotzmann's maps are highly detailed with symbols for churches, roads, court houses, distilleries, iron works, mills, academies, county lines, and town lines.
For his map of New Jersey, Sotzmann used William Faden’s celebrated “The Province of New Jersey, Divided into East and West, Commonly Called the Jerseys”, 1777, which in turn was based on the survey work of Bernard Ratzer, and which had settled the boundary between New Jersey and New York.