Book Description

Imagine you're in Hancock County; the year is 1881. With downeast Maine still in the age of sail, goods are shipped by coasting schooner; people get around in boats, by foot, horse and buggy, stagecoach, steamer, and scow ferry. Coastal towns are bustling with local industries-brickyards, shipyards, water-powered saw and grist mills, fishing, farming, lumbering. Quarries ship granite to markets near and far, and a mining boom is in full swing.Everyone who loves exploring downeast Maine, maps, history, old deeds, and genealogy will enjoy using and perusing this remarkably detailed historic Atlas, a fascinating time capsule of Hancock County in the last glow of a 19th-century coastal economy. Compiled and published by George N. Colby, the original Atlas was drawn in Ellsworth based on actual surveys and then-new U.S. Coast Survey charts, and engraved and printed in Philadelphia; only 350 copies were printed, now a collector's item. The new Coastwise Geographic Edition, a facsimile reprint, includes all the archival maps arranged in a more geographically consistent layout for today's users, with period photos, a preface for historic context, lively excerpts from an 1878 county survey complementing the town profiles, a bibliography of complementary sources, and an index of historic and current place names. In publishing the Coastwise Geographic Edition of Colby's Atlas, Jane Crosen, a Maine mapmaker with deep roots in Hancock County, is pleased to keep in print such an important documentation of downeast Maine's history and cultural landscape. Quality paperback with fabric binding, printed in black & white on cream paper with full-color covers, 70 pages, 12"x 153⁄4".