The Fry and Jefferson Map of Virginia

The Map of Col. Washington's Era

     One of the most beautiful maps of colonial Virginia is "A map of the most inhabited part of Virginia containing the whole province of Maryland with part of Pensilvania, New Jersey and North Carolina" by Joshua Fry and Peter Jefferson. The second edition of 1754 which includes some roads is a good reference for a study of the French and Indian War era in Virginia. It is the map that was available to Col. Washington and to other officials during that time. If you can locate places by their proximity to rivers, it is a good reference to Virginia and West Virginia of the mid-eighteenth century.

     The map is available from the Library of Congress as a jp2 format digital file, but it is extremely large, about 25 megs. You may download it at this link. Click on the map image, and it will take you to a page with an on-line viewer; you can download the entire jp2 file through the link at the bottom of that page.

     Since many people are not able to handle such a large file, we have split the map up into four sections, northwest, northeast, southwest and southeast and reduced them in size. The files are about 1.5 megs in size and will print on legal size paper. You may download the four sections below. We suggest you may want to download them to your computer and view them with a paint program such as Photoshop Elements, PaintShop or the like.

A small version of the entire map is shown below