While suggestions of a canal between Philadelphia and Baltimore originated in the 17th century, and efforts to dig this canal date from shortly after the Revolution, it was the Chesapeake and Delaware Canal that made the waterway a reality. Henry Schenck Tanner (1786-1858), an important early American cartographer, produced this map showing the proposed route of the canal for the Fifth General Report of the President and Directors of the Chesapeake and Delaware Canal Company (Philadelphia, 1824). The text at bottom center reads “Longitude East from Washington.” The signature at bottom right reads “Drawn & Engrav’d by H. S. Tanner.”
Ref: Walter W. Ristow, American Maps and Mapmakers: Commercial Cartography in the Nineteenth Century (Detroit, 1985), pp. 191-206.
James Walker, “Henry S. Tanner and Cartographic Expression of American Expansion in the 1820s,” Oregon Historical Quarterly 111 (2010): 444-461.
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