Description
<p>This map, published in London in 1778 by New Jersey born military engineer Thomas Hutchins, shows what was then the western territory claimed by Virginia, Pennsylvania, Maryland, and North Carolina. Hutchins surveyed the land west of the Allegheny mountains and around the Ohio and Mississippi Rivers during his service as an engineer in the French and Indian War, and then on subsequent surveying trips between 1764 and 1775. Note how the state of Virginia claimed what is now Kentucky and much of West Virginia, territory which had been ceded by the Haudenosaunee in the 1968 Treaty of Fort Stanwix.</p><p>Hutchins also identified the region labeled “Indiana,” southeast of the Ohio River between the southern border of Pennsylvania and the little Kanawha Creek, which he wrote had been granted to merchants Samuel Wharton, William Trent, and George Morgan in 1768. The merchants had attempted to propose a new colony, Vandalia, which would have extended this territory into much of West Virginia and Kentucky, but their proposition never came to be.</p>
