1833 School Girl Map of New England
GUEST:
It was in my grandmother's house in Bridgeport, Connecticut. And from there, when she broke up her home, she gave it to my Uncle Jack, and it went up to Vermont, and then New Hampshire, respectively. My mother came down to live with us two years ago, and Jack called and said, would I like the map? And we all knew what the map was, and I said, "Of course." So he sent it down. We've been enjoying it. The family has never known who it belonged to. We had a certain amount of research done. We know she's not a family relative.
APPRAISER:
You're talking about this young lady, Sarah Ryan, whose name is on here in beautiful calligraphy. But this is a genre of map that is very popular among collectors and very sought after by museums and libraries here in the United States. This is called a schoolgirl map. Sarah Ryan was a schoolgirl. Almost every grade-school child in the United States were given printed maps and told to make a copy. Now, Sarah's not the best scholar that we've ever had, because we have some misspellings throughout this map. But it was also a time when you had phonetic spellings. It's based on a printed and published map of the times.
GUEST:
Okay.
APPRAISER:
Probably from the 1790s or 1815 or '14, even though you've got a date here, 1833. So that's when she was in school, and probably in New England. Now, sometimes people look at these and say, "Oh, look at these bright colors." Did you take a magic marker to write on this map? (laughing) Did you?
GUEST:
No! (laughing)
APPRAISER:
Well, good. A lot of the old maps have that color. And what they did is they took a little piece of felt, they twisted it up and put it in watercolor, and then showed the boundaries of the state. You've even got an old frame. This is a nice, heavy, Americana frame. I would evaluate this for retail purposes at between $1,500 and $1,800.
GUEST:
Great, nice to know.
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