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A New and Elegant General Atlas
by Arrowsmith & Lewis, 1804
SCUA houses several hundred historic maps relating primarily to New England and the northeast. Among the highlights are several of H. F. Walling’s wall maps of Massachusetts and its counties; approximately 200 atlases for Massachusetts and other northeastern states (including those of Beers, Walling and Gray, Walker, the Town Boundary survey, and the Massachusetts Topographical Survey Commission), and a small series of surveys of the Quabbin watershed prepared for the Massachusetts Metropolitan District Water Supply Commission between 1926 and 1933. The collections also include a mix of town plans, pocket maps, railroad and road maps, travelers’ and tourists’ guides, and birdseye views of Massachusetts towns.
Apart from its New England maps, SCUA holds a noteworthy collection of rare maps and plans from Meiji-era Japan, including geological, topographic, and touristic maps collected or drafted by the geologist Benjamin Smith Lyman. In both English and Japanese, occasionally both, these maps reflect the unique history connecting UMass and Japan and they document a period of intensive transfer of western technology.
Locating maps in SCUA
UMarmap is an itemized listing of maps held by SCUA, arranged by location and date, in that order. Many, but not all, of these maps are also cataloged into the Library’s on-line catalog.
The general Map Collection in the Du Bois Library contains over 110,000 maps, atlases, and related materials, including electronic resources, that document themes ranging from topography and geology, to political boundaries, hydrology, soils, land use, insurance risk, recreation areas, travel and transportation, and the Second World War. Although there is a special focus on maps of Massachusetts, these maps cover the solar system, the world, continents, oceans, and all countries.
