Thanks to prompting from one of our regular readers, Ken Wedding of Minnesota, I found the 1865 Martenet map of Charles County. There is an interactive map on the Maryland State Archive's Underground Railroad website (see link below). It is interactive in the sense that you can zoom in and out at a reasonably high level of resolution.
http://www.msa.md.gov/msa/mdslavery/html/mapped_images/chmap.html
Unlike many of the atlas-maps produced by the Simon J. Martenet publishing company for Maryland counties, the Charles County map is not rich in information. These were subscription maps...if you wanted your name to appear on the map, you paid. In wealthier counties like Anne Arundel, there are lots of landowner names on the map and some of the wealthier counties have updated maps, so there might be one from around 1860 and another from around 1880.
For other Martenet maps of Maryland counties (and for other neat digital resources), I recommend the Library of Congress website: www.loc.gov
Click American Memory, then Maps, then type in Martenet. There are eight or so Maryland counties and you can zoom in and still have great resolution.
Thanks Ken.
Jim
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Just a slight clarification:the Martenet firm was (and is) a surveying firm, not a publishing house. The reason for the difference in detail between the Charles County map and some of the other county maps produced by the firm is that the Charles County map was a part of the bound book-form atlas of the state, where each page was much smaller than the wall-sized individual county maps. More information on our 19th century mapping activities in the link below. Thanks for your interest.
Joel Leininger, Principal, S.J. Martenet & Co.
www.martenet.com/PublishedMaps.html
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