A Map of the Connecticut Western Reserve, from actual Survey (Pease, 1798)
Seth Pease’s map of the Connecticut Western Reserve “from actual Survey”, engraved and printed for the author by Amos Doolittle at New Haven in 1798: northeastern Ohio from the Pennsylvania line west to Sandusky Bay. East of the Cuyahoga it lays out the five-mile townships the Connecticut Land Company’s surveyors ran in 1796–97, numbered by range from the Pennsylvania line and by town from the south line, many of them already named (Cleveland, Euclid, Mentor, Aurora, Warren, Youngstown, Palmyra), the Lake Erie shore and its river mouths, and the Salt Spring on the Big Beaver (Mahoning). West of the Cuyahoga, the Portage Path and the Tuscarawas — the boundary of the treaties of Fort McIntosh (1785) and Greenville (1795) — the country is lettered “Unsurveyed Land and Subject to Indian Claims”, with the Fire Lands at its western end: in the 1790s the country of Wyandot, Lenape (Delaware), Seneca and Odawa towns and hunting camps. A double-dashed “Indian Path” runs from the Cuyahoga at the head of the portage east through Palmyra to the Salt Spring and the Mahoning at the mouth of Mosquito Creek, and the “Portage Path” crosses from the Cuyahoga to the Tuscarawas. Not shown: the title, the notes on the Fire Lands and the survey, the scale of miles and the margins.
Source
| Map | A map of the Connecticut Western Reserve : from actual survey |
|---|---|
| Author | Seth Pease, 1798 |
| Archive | Library of Congress |
| Rights | Public domain. Published 1798 — before 1931, so public domain in the United States. Evidence |
| Accuracy | About 3 km (RMS 0.3 km at 47 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 second-degree polynomial through 47 places read from the scan — 33 corners of the five-mile townships, matched to the corners of the same townships today, the mouths of the rivers on the Lake Erie shore from Conneaut Creek to the Huron, the entrance of Sandusky Bay, the mouths of Tinkers Creek, the Little Cuyahoga and Mosquito Creek, and the Mahoning at the Pennsylvania line. The townships are drawn to the survey’s own measures — the 8th range wider and the 2nd narrower than five miles, as they are on the ground — and fit closely: left out of the fit in turn, half the places fall within 0.2 km of where it puts them (RMS 0.4 km; the worst the mouths of the Huron and the Cuyahoga, 1.2 and 0.8 km). The lake shore west of the Cuyahoga lies nearly as close; the inland rivers of the unsurveyed land are sketched. The border’s latitude scale agrees with the fit to about 1′, but its longitude scale is drawn about a fifth too short (83° west of London falls near 82°37′), so the graticule is not used. The title, the notes, the scale of miles, the margins and the join between the sheet’s two halves across the lake are masked. See the methodology. |
| Version | 1.0.0, updated 2026-10-16 |
| Covers | Ohio |
Downloads
- Google Earth overlay (KMZ) — free (2.4 MB)
- GeoTIFF, tinted trails, EPSG:4326 (8000 × 3732; QGIS, ArcGIS) — free (8.9 MB)
- Print sheet over today’s map (3600 × 2200 PNG) — free (3.2 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
- 1.0.0 (2026-10-16): First release: placed by hand at 47 places. From the Library of Congress, Geography and Map Division (2024593569); added for Project Homeland.
Credits
- From the Library of Congress, Geography and Map Division (2024593569); added for Project Homeland
- Georeferencing: Native Routes
- Scan: Library of Congress
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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