The Clove

I love real, physical maps. The digital, super-accurate versions have placed a wealth of information options at the touch of your phone. To me, they are cold and devoid of personality. There’s nothing like the self importance a kid feels unfolding a three-by-four-foot state map when they are in the navigator’s seat during a cross-country ride. Those maps would block the driver’s view of anything in the right lane while drowning out all conversation. They did, however give you a real feel for the distances involved, especially when you ran out of coverage and had to change maps. This experience will probably never again be shared, Waze, Apple and Google maps now do it the safest and most informative way. I used them for hours searching for the locations important to The Clove book. They proved essential companions to the tattered worn maps I relied on to find places whose names are changed (or gone) since colonial times. These maps also lived on my phone and iPad as reproductions from collections in museums.

I found that many of the earliest existing maps of the Clove were done by Robert Erskine, who was appointed by George Washington as mapmaker for the Continental Army and also a victim of The Smith Gang.

In my previous post, “My Historian Dad” I talked about his job creating copies of maps for West Point, and I still have a few of these, some large ones hung on the walls of our house when I was a kid.