Here are some fascinating details from Gene Waddell's Introduction to the 1980 reprint edition of "Mills Atlas of the State of South Carolina 1825." Please excuse any typos. I haven't triple checked it. There were actually four essential works produced. First, there were surveys made of each District made between 1817 and 1821. Second, there were some district maps produced between 1818 and 1821 from some of the surveys. Third, in the fall of 1821 the first 50 copies of Wilson's Map of the State were printed and another 2,500 were printed in April 1882. And Fourth, Robert Mills worked to produce the Atlas between 1823 and 1825 using the earlier works as the basis. The Atlas was published in 1825 and first distributed in 1826. The first three projects were funded and controlled by the State. However, the sales of the State Map were miserable. As a result, the State Legislature did not accept proposals to produce an Atlas made in 1821 and 1822 by the Board of Public Works. Mills was one of the two paid Commissioners of the Board of Public Works. The Board of Public Works was abolished in 1822 and replaced with a Superintendant of Public Works. In 1823, Mills requested permission to privately produce an atlas. On 19 December, 1823, the Legislature ratified a contract for Mills to produce the Atlas. The original contract called for the State to receive "at least" 12 free atlases and to purchase fifty more at a total cost of $600. By December 1825, a new contract had been made and the State was to receive 80 atlases for $1,200. Mills charged $16 per copy to regular subscribers. The number of Atlases printed for the first edition is unknown. At least one thousand separate district maps were printed. By 1980 there had been seven printings of the Atlas, including the 1980 reprint. Mills himself reprinted a rare edition of about 1838. The third printing was in 1938 by Lucy Hampton Bostick and Fant H. Thornley. The Fourth printing was in 1965 by Robert Pearce Wilkins and John D. Keels, Jr. The fifth printing was in 1979 by A. Press, Inc. The sixth printing was in 1979 by the Sandlapper Store, Inc. The seventh printing was in 1980 by Southern Historical Press. Gene Waddell wrote the introduction for the seventh printing. Here is some more interesting information extracted from Waddell's writing. "George Blackburn proposed a map of the State in 1815 because he needed a job. A year earlier he had been Professor of Mathematics and Astronomy at the South Carolina College, but he resigned when its trustees refused to give him a vote of confidence. His numerous suspensions of students and his generally excessive discipline had so provoked the entire student body that on 8 February, 1814, he was burned in effigy, his house was damaged with brick-bats, and the militia had to be called out to quell a full-scale riot.... On 2 December, 1815, in a handsomely printed petition, Blackburn defended himself as a teacher and recommended himself for 'a great work; the publick calls for a good map of our state....' He noted that South Carolina was 'the only State, east of the Mountains, that has not a map, constructed upon a large scal, and calculated to answer all the topographical purposes of the geographer, the historian, the legislator and the states man.' He outlined all the steps that would be necessary to prepare such a map and presented his qualifications. He suggested that existing plats and maps could supply much of the needed information if free access were provided to them. He estimated that one year would be needed for astronomical observations and two or three years for the whole plan. Although Blackburn impressed the Legislature with the need for a map, he did not convince them that he was the person to undertake it.... The committee proposed an appropriation of five thousand dollars for each of two or three years, but instead of placing Blackburn in charge, it requested the Governor to superinten the project and to appoint a fit person to undertake it. The Governor, David R. Williams, decided to give Blackburn one year to accomplish as much as he could and to demonstrate 'a just regard to economy of money and time.' On 14 February, 1816, he wrote Blackburn expressing confidence in his ability, but warning him that if he failed to follow instructions, 'I shall not hesitate to dismiss you from the service of the State.' .... Blackburn was required to submit weekly transcriptions of all his notes, Williams allowed that astronomical observations could be made 'as may be deemed necessary,' but he stipulated that landmarks were to be carefully recorded. He instructed him to traverse the entire state with an odometer attached to his vehicle.... He also instructed him to descend rivers and note the location of falls and other obstructions and to propose locations for canals. From March through August, Blackburn traveled throughout the State. His journal and reports are not known to survive, but his determinations of latitude were printed and enable his route to be reconstructed. His observations were later considered accurate, but they were insufficient to convince the Legislature that he could prepare the map he had proposed. In December, when it met again, he was not rehired. .... On 19 December the Legislature asked the Governor to appoint surveyors to prepare district maps which could be used for compiling an accurate map of the State. The report a joint committee of both houses called for maps to be based on an actual survey, to have a scale of a mile to half-an-inch, and to indicate '... the election districts and parishes, the roads with their courses and distances, the towns, villages and taverns, the ferries, bridges, manufactures, mines, and mineral springs, the rivers and creeks, with their courses, rapids, falls, and all obstructions to the navigation, the variations in the face of the country, shewing the extent of the swamps, of the level, hilly and mountain land.' During 1817, the next Governor, Andrew Pickens, Jr., conscientiously visited every district to seek the best qualified surveyors. He informed the Legislature at its next session on 28 November, 1817, that he had made contracts for surveys of all but a few districts and that the surveyors understood they were not to be paid until their complete maps had been approved..... ... Seven of the eight maps which remained to be completed were approved in 1820, leaving only Sumter District to be resurveyed. Sumter had been begun by one surveyor, who sold his contract to another surveyor, whose work proved to be inadequate. Stephen H. Boykin, who had turned in exceptionally detailed maps of Kershaw and Lancaster Districts, was intrusted with the production of another map to enable the manuscript for the Map of the State to be completed. He worked during the winter of 1820 and by 24 March, 1821, had submitted an approved map. Altogether, if two attributions are correct, twenty surveyors worked on the twenty-eight district surveys.... While nearly all of the surviving surveys have a title, sometimes an embellished one, only five have a cartouche. Most are signed, but only four are dated. About a third have compass roses, legends, and scales (rarely elaborate ones).... On all of the eighteen surviving surveys, the roads have been drawn from actual measurement of the distances and angles. Not all features were surveyed, and many lf the maps have only wavy lines for water courses. Most have little line quality, and when roads and waterways are depicted with single lines of about the same thickness, neither stands out distinctly. The majority of the surveys have names written randomly in all directions and written in script of irregular size.... A great deal of work remained for both Wilson and Mills. Eventually, Wilson was the person chosen to draft the final version of the Map of the State, and he did most of the revision and compilation in 1820. .... Wilson went to Philadelphia to supervise the engraving and printing during the fall of 1821, and an initial press run of 50 copies were printed in 1821 (although the map carries a copyright date of 10 April, 1882). On 2 April, 1882, Tanner contracted to print an additional twenty-five hundred copies. .... The total cost of the State map was $65,520.54. For 2,550 copies, the cost per copy was $25.69, much more than a copy could have been sold for. The Legislature hoped to recover the full cost by eventually printing 5,000 more copies and selling all of them for $10.00 each. Two years later, sales had been so miserable that the Legislature considered it 'indespensably necessary' to reduce the price to $5.00, and another printing was out of the question. ... The poor sales were blamed on cotton prices, which were exceptionally low, but the map was impracticably large as well. Copies are nearly four by five feet, much too large to be consulted easily, especially while out of doors. Although Wilson's map was by far the most accurate one of every part of the State that had appeared, it sold so poorly that the Legislature had no interest in supporting the printing of more of the district surveys. In 1818, three years before Wilson's map was first printed, he had been instructed to make copies of the district maps available as quickly as possible. Copies were needed by road commissioners and canal builders for work that was in progress. .... The demand must have increased for five district maps to have been printed in 1821. Mills worked on the Atlas from about December, 1823, when the Legislature authorized him to use the State-sponsored district surveys as the basis for his maps, until about mid-1825, when he must have submitted the final versions in time for them to be engraved, printed, bound, and sent back by January 1826. He thus worked approximately one and one-half years on the Atlas. Since the 'Statistics' was copyrighted on 28 November, 1826, he had to have been working on this volume of more than eight-hundred pages at the same time as the Atlas. He still had to sell the copies himself, and distribution probably occupied him for at least two more years.... " Hope you enjoyed, Steven J. Coker [email protected] [email protected] http://www.wp.com/Coker DIBBLELAW wrote: > > PMFJI... > > I have never heard the subscriber theory before. Mills Atlas dates from > 1825 (reprinted in 1937 and - I believe - once again since then). However, > one hundred years later, this subscriber approach was not an unusual > practice: the Yates Snowden multi-volume history of South Carolina contains > several volumes of biographies of prominent South Carolinians of the era. > Charles L. Dibble > -----Original Message----- > From: [email protected] <[email protected]> > To: [email protected] <[email protected]> > Date: Friday, January 30, 1998 12:39 AM > Subject: Mills Atlas > > >Steve, thank you for the information regarding the Mills Atlas. I've been > >wondering about the surnames shown on the maps. Surely they weren't the > >only landholders. Someone told me that "subscribers" (whose payments > >financed the project) got their names listed. Is that true? > >Thanks...Jo H.