Map of the country between Lake Erie and the Ohio, with the Indian paths (John Heckewelder, 1796), from the papers of Gen. Moses Cleaveland
The Moravian missionary John Heckewelder’s manuscript map of northeastern Ohio, made for the Connecticut Land Company in 1796: the Indian paths between the Cuyahoga, the Tuscarawas, the Beaver and Pittsburgh, the Moravian Indian towns, and the lands of the purchases.
Source
| Map | Heckewelder Map |
|---|---|
| Author | John Heckewelder, 1796 |
| Archive | Wikimedia Commons |
| Rights | Public domain. Published 1796 — before 1931, so public domain in the United States. Evidence |
| Accuracy | About 42 km (RMS 4.1 km at 11 control points). Placed by hand in a map-queue session and approved by a person. If something sits in the wrong place, members can fix it with Fix placement on the map. |
| Method | Placed by hand: a smoothing thin-plate spline through 11 places read from the scan and matched to their positions today. See the methodology. |
| Version | 1.0.1, updated 2026-10-06 |
| Covers | Ohio, Pennsylvania |
Downloads
- Google Earth overlay (KMZ) — free (2.2 MB)
- GeoTIFF, tinted trails, EPSG:4326 (8000 × 5432; QGIS, ArcGIS) — free (7.2 MB)
- Print sheet over today’s map (3600 × 2200 PNG) — free (3 MB)
Project Homeland
This map’s trails are traced into Project Homeland, one map of the trail network melded from every traced source, where they are compared with the other maps’ lines. Members can trace more of them: Trace a trail on the map.
Changelog
- 1.0.1 (2026-10-06): Fix: the sheet’s edges, cut off before, restored (bounds from the warp itself); place names re-placed where the map draws them (they had been set by an approximation of the warp: median 13.2 km, up to 19 km off).
- 1.0.0 (2026-09-30): First release: placed by hand at 11 places. From the Native Routes sources register; Wikimedia Commons (from the Western Reserve Historical Society’s copy).
Credits
- From the Native Routes sources register; Wikimedia Commons (from the Western Reserve Historical Society’s copy)
- Georeferencing: Native Routes
- Scan: Wikimedia Commons
Control points
The full list of control points with residuals is in control-points.geojson. Historic names indexed for search: names.geojson.
Something on this map sits in the wrong place? Members can show where with Fix placement on the map — confirmed fixes are tested against the map’s other control points each night and credited here. For anything else, report a problem.
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