(Click the image for a larger view)
Prolific local historian Terry McNealy calls J. D. Scott's 1876 Combination Atlas Map of Bucks County “the greatest monument of nineteenth century mapmaking” and he's totally right. The atlas is huge, with a vast amount of detail, and has all the landowners' names marked out on each municipality.
Intact copies pop up now and then (the Spruance Library has one), but more often you'll run into a page torn from its binding by some enterprising antique dealer and packaged for individual sale. Intact or not, the atlas is way out of my price range.
I'm of a generation utterly spoiled by the Internet, so it drives me crazy that I can't just, like, click somewhere online and thumb through the whole atlas. Atlas, alas.
Happily, sometimes I'll stumble across a single digitized page. Up there, for example, is the page illustrating Haycock Township, which I believe I snagged from Haycock Township Historical Society.
How great are Scott's little illustrations of school houses? And check out Haycock Mountain — it looks like something from Tolkien, doesn't it?
My favorite part of the map, though, is this little drawing of the "Stoney Garden."
Aww.
I spent a long time furrowing my brow and scratching my head before I realized that, though it's sort of nearby, Stoney Garden isn't Ringing Rocks. Silly me. Ringing Rocks is in Bridgeton Township. According to MacReynolds's Place Names in Bucks County, there are seven "areas of ringing rocks in Pennsylvania, three of them in Bucks County, namely: Ringing Rocks, Stony Garden in Haycock Township and Rocky Valley in Springfield Township, near Coopersburg."
I've always loved this map - it shows my Great-Great Grandfather's residence (Mr. Austin McCarty) on the East side of Haycock mountain just on Haycock run. I would note that he moved just that year - 1876 to Nockamixon with his wife, Lucinda Buck, to take possesion of the Buck family residence there (modern day Bucksville House B&B) In 1881, Mr. McCarty was elected Recorder of Bucks county. He died in 1888 of tuberculosis. He is buried at St John the Baptist Catholic church in Haycock, with his wife, Lucinda (she had moved to Bethlehem PA with my Great Grandfather who ended up working at the Steel works there; his cousin was C.A. Buck who later became a vice president of Bethlehem Steel.) If you'd like to check out my family tree (I've added many notes) or correspond, my tree is located at:
ReplyDeletehttp://wc.rootsweb.ancestry.com/cgi-bin/igm.cgi?op=GET&db=cjmuller&id=I0061
All the best,
Chris Muller
Chris,
ReplyDeleteThank you so much! I'm so happy you liked the map. I've got a copy of the 1876 atlas it appeared in -- so many wonderful township maps!
I liked your Rootsweb page. It looks like you worked really hard on it. Impressive!
Best,
Rayna
A treasure!
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