About 20 years ago, Bill Leap happened to visit the Hessian State Archives in Marburg, Germany. While there, he discovered some amzing maps that no one outside of Germany had seen in a long time. The maps depicted New Jersey and surrounding states at the time of the Revolution. In that pre-digital era all he could do was make some notes and then tell his friends at home what he had seen. Less that a year ago, Ed Fox checked through the online holdings list of the Hessian State Archives. He found the maps and asked the archives if it was possible to obtain digital copies. Such a thing was possible and a cd with the map images was picked up and returned from Germany by Ed's friend Curt Noe. Here, then, are the maps. While the West Jersey History Roundtable has sent copies of the maps to various libraries, archives and government agencies, this is still, so far as we know, the only place to view them easily. The files tend to be large ( around 300k to over 2mb). This is certainly not ideal but necessary to keep the map images large enough to use. We hope you find these worth the wait. Viewers should note that, while these maps are detailed, they only show those details that the mapmakers were interested in. So, not all roads are shown, some creeks may be a bit off, and, particularly on the larger maps, there are some slight issues of scale and placement. That said, these maps are an amazing resource and we hope you enjoy them.
