NOTES

ABBREVIATIONS

NYC: Municipal Archives: New York City Municipal Archives

NYHS: New-York Historical Society

NYSA: New York State Archives

I. IN WHICH REUBEN SKYE ROSE-REDWOOD AND J. R. LEMUEL MORRISON SET OUT TO FIND THE IMAGINED CITY

1. Heckscher, Creating Central Park, 36.

2. Moore, A Plain Statement, 49–50.

3. Augustyn and Cohen, Manhattan in Maps, 102.

II. IN WHICH JOHN RANDEL JR. AFFIXES THE CITY TO THE ISLAND

1. JR Field Books, 61.2, courtesy of NYHS.

2. JR Field Books, 62.2, NYHS.

3. JR Field Books, 61.2, NYHS.

4. JR Field Books, 61.2, 63.3, NYHS.

5. Perry, Scenes, 6. Perry began his account: “There is, perhaps, no class of men who endure so many hardships and privations—whose fortitude and energy, whose intellectual powers, are taxed to a greater extent than the Government surveyor in his operations of the wild forests of the Southern and Western portions of the United States, in paving the way for future wealth and aggrandizement of his country; and yet there is no class of men, of useful occupation, who receive a less share of consideration and sympathy.”

6. JR Field Books, 59.1, NYHS.

7. Calhoun, American Civil Engineer, 26.

8. Details of Levi DeWitt’s visit with John Randel Jr. in New York City come from an 1812 Randel notebook, courtesy of the collection of Mark D. Tomasko.

9. Hackett, Rude Hand, 63.

10. Charles Ellet to Mary Ellet, August 29, 1827, Ellet Papers, Special Collections Library, University of Michigan.

11. Hackett, Rude Hand, 67.

12. Worth, Recollections of Albany, 31; Hackett, Rude Hand, 74.

13. Carey, Exhibit, 7; JR Field Books, 64.1, NYHS

14. A scan of the title page of The Elements of Mechanics was graciously provided by Michael Dixon, historian at the Historical Society of Cecil County. It was published in 1832 by Mathew Carey (Carey & Lea) and dedicated to Clement Clarke Moore. Renwick was a member of the American Institute at the same time Randel was, and they were both on the Arts and Sciences Committee. For a report Randel wrote on a dry dock design for the Franklin Institute, see The Franklin Journal and American Mechanics Magazine, January 1827. Records at the American Association for the Advancement of Science show that Randel was elected in 1854 and was a member in 1855 and 1856. On Nathan Lanesford Foster, see Octavo vol. 63, Diary no. 87, Papers of Nathan Lanesford Foster 1804–1882, courtesy of the American Antiquarian Society.

15. Hackett, Rude Hand, 95–96.

16. Albany Gazette, April 14, 1808; Ogdena Fort (Mrs. Jerome Fort), notes, Madison County Historical Society; Sokoloff and Khan, “Democratization of Invention,”364. All conversions from nineteenth-century currency into 2011 values were made in mid-2012 at Measuring Worth: www.measuringworth.com/uscompare, using the purchasing power calculator.

17. Jesse Randel Jr. to Catherine Randel, January 2, 1834, and Catherine Randel to Abraham and Rebecca Randel, July 9, 1819, Madison County Historical Society.

18. Catherine Randel to Abraham and Rebecca Randel, July 9, 1819, Madison County Historical Society. Catherine chastised her sister-in-law on behalf of her own sister Rebecca: “Sister R writes you all have forgotten that you have a sister that is a bereaved widow and with helpless babe among strangers, solitary and alone. I think it is cruel in the extreme to treat a sister in her situation with so much neglect.”

19. Ibid.; Holden, Sir William Herschel, 114–15.

20. Thoreau worked as a surveyor from 1850 to 1862, apparently teaching himself through books such as Charles Davies’s Elements of Surveying and Navigation. He also reproduced maps, seemingly in an effort to understand how the landscape and the people in it had changed. For more details, see Hessler, “From Ortelius to Champlain.”

21. Linklater, Measuring America, 16–18.

22. Love, Geodaesia, n.p. See also Bedini, Thinkers and Tinkers, 41 and ch. 4. Bedini notes that although many textbooks on surveying came from England, “few of them . . . contained information useful in coping with the conditions of the New World, which were substantially different from those in England and Europe.”

23. Snyder, Mapping of New Jersey, 68, 69. DeWitt and Erskine’s New Jersey maps “are so accurate that they can be super-imposed over modern topographical maps of old roads still in use—and there are many—with only minor discrepancies,” notes Snyder (74).

24. Simeon DeWitt to John Bogart, October 2, 1776, and July 25, 1779, in Bogart, John Bogart Letters. The letters also conveyed DeWitt’s religious views; “You will find that all the enjoyment of this life except those which are purely rational and divine are Vanity and in the End prove a Vexation of spirit,” he wrote to Bogart on August 1, 1781.

25. Bogart, John Bogart Letters, 41; Heidt, Simeon DeWitt, 8.

26. The original Military Tract was such poor land in the Adirondacks that veterans refused it, according to Jo Margaret Mano; the second allocation in the western part of the state was accordingly called the New Military Tract. Many of the townships there were given Roman and Greek names, such as Homer, Virgil, Manlius, and Cincinnatus, which DeWitt was credited with choosing. But he claimed no knowledge of the, as he put it, “obnoxious names”; Ristow, American Maps and Mapmakers, 78.

27. Munsell, Annals of Albany, 275.

28. See Mano, “Unmapping the Iroquois,” 180. Military lands in upstate New York had been laid out in 7-square-mile parcels in 1781, before the national land ordinance, according to Johnson, Order Upon the Land, 42–44.

29. Johnson, Order Upon the Land. n.p. (preface); Linklater, Measuring America, 168.

30. Johnson, Order Upon the Land, 36; Johnson, “Rational and Ecological Aspects of the Quarter Section,” 336. Johnson notes that Japan too has a history of a 36-based system. Certain forms, such as the circle, she writes, “have their roots in the human condition. The widely occurring use of the number six for subdivisions may, also, be linked to the primary directions in space ‘natural’ to humans, i.e., left to right, forward and backward, up or down”; see Ehrenberg, “Pattern and Process,” 115.

31. Series A4016-77, vol. 12, folder 69, NYSA.

32. Mano, “Unmapping the Iroquois,” 178.

33. Ibid., 186. Also see Marx, Machine in the Garden, 38: “Even in the sixteenth century the American countryside was the object of something like a calculated real estate promotion.”

34. Journal entry of November 10, 1860, quoted in Hoy, “Thoreau as a Surveyor,” 212, 217.

35. Forest clearing brought Americans “pleasurable excitement,” wrote Basil Hall, a Scottish captain visiting the United States in the late 1820s. With a good ax the settler “sets merrily forward in his attack upon the wilderness . . . This passion for turning up new soils, and clearing wilderness, heretofore untouched by the hand of man, is said to increase with years. Under such constant changes of place, there can be very little individual regard felt or professed for particular spots. I might almost say, that as far as I could see or learn, there is nothing in any part of America similar to what we call local attachments. There is a strong love of country, it is true; but this is quite a different affair, as it seems to be entirely unconnected with any permanent fondness for one spot more than another.” Hall, Travels in North America, 146.

36. Simeon DeWitt to John Randel, Jr., April 24, 1819, NYSA; Simeon DeWitt to John Randel, Jr., May 13, 1808, Rutgers University Archives; JR Field Books, 64.10, NYHS.

37. National Intelligencer and Washington Advertiser, July 12, 1805.

38. New-York Evening Post, April 8, 1814.

39. JR Field Books, 64.1, NYHS.

40. Series A4016-77, vol. 12, folder 69, NYSA; oaths of office, NYHS.

41. Series A0452, vol. 10, NYSA.

42. Ibid.

43. “Remonstrance against selling of grounds near government house,” April 24, 1815, NYC Municipal Archives; Guernsey, New York City, 39.

44. Spanne, “The Greatest Grid.”

45. Minutes of the Common Council, July 25, 1808.

46. Cajori, Hassler, 42; Minutes of the Common Council, February 16, 1807; Minutes of the Common Council, March 4, 1807.

47. Judd, Untilled Garden, 7. Judd is quoting Morris’s Notes on the United States of America (Philadelphia, 1806).

48. New-York Herald, March 2, 1877; Stokes, Iconography.

49. JR Field Books, 61.2, NYHS.

50. Morris, DeWitt, and Rutherford, “Remarks of the Commissioners for Laying Out Streets and Roads in the City of New York”; Gouverneur Morris to Simeon DeWitt, October 2, 1807, Grantz Collection, Historical Society of Pennsylvania. The Minutes of the Common Council suggest that Morris was most active of the three commissions in directing the work, because his name appears most often in conjunction with it.

51. Randel, “City of New York, north of Canal street,” 847.

52. JR Field Books, 68.1 (2), NYHS. In 1795 such transits were very rare. David Rittenhouse wrote to Simeon DeWitt that he knew of only two portable transit instruments in the states, one made by Andrew Ellicott and one by himself; Series A4016-77, vol. 18, folder 49, NYSA.

53. JR Field Books, 59.2, NYHS. Deborah J. Warner of the National Museum of American History and other experts of early surveying practices note that the names of instruments were quite fluid in Randel’s day: one man’s transit was another man’s theodolite. An American surveyor’s compass was a British circumferentor. Without the actual instrument in hand or an image thereof, it remains hard to know exactly what a surveyor was referring to. These descriptions of Randel’s basic equipment are consistent with early nineteenth-century American techniques, but no images or descriptions tell us what kind of theodolite or telescope he used.

54. “Randel City Map Will Be Preserved,” New York Times, May 21, 1993; JR Field Books, 68.1 (2), NYHS.

55. Valentine, Manual of Old New York, 841.

56. Ibid., 843.

57. Lamb, History of the City of New York, 571–72; Randel, “City of New York, north of Canal street,”848.

58. John Mills v. John Randel Jr., 1810R-47, Division of Old Records, New York County Clerk’s Office. “The standard language of trespass is very brute force and arms, very masculine,” says Alfred S. Konefsky. “It is formulaic and almost poetic. And that was the standard issue language for centuries.”

59. Hartog, Public Property and Private Power, 161. I am grateful to Stephen Gersztoff at the New York State Legislature for locating a copy of “An act respecting Streets in the City of New-York,” March 24, 1809, 32nd session, ch. 103.

60. Albany Gazette, September 22, 1820; Munsell, Annals of Albany, vol. 2, 150.

61. “Remarks of the Commissioners for Laying Out Streets and Roads in the City of New York,” n.p. Morris’s calculations of the number of monuments needed was incorrect. Presuming one monument per intersection, 155 streets and 12 avenues would yield 1,860 monuments.

62. Minutes of the Common Council, December 3, 1810.

63. Randel, “City of New York, north of Canal street,” 839.

64. See John Randel Jr. to Mr. Thomas R. Mercein, December 3, 1813, NYC Municipal Archives. Calhoun, American Civil Engineer, 59, notes that “the importance of exact elevations and grades in this task furnished another distinction sometimes made between the engineer and the land surveyor. Ordinary surveying with its legal purposes had to meet precise standards only for horizontal measurements. Engineering had to seek also vertical precision, and the use of the leveling instrument was occasionally noted as a concrete act of marking the transition to engineering from some other occupation.”

65. On true and magnetic north, I am indebted to Dennis Kent of Columbia University’s Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory, who explained the mechanism and checked for accuracy.

66. Quoted in Cajori, Hassler, 171–72.

67. Border disputes still arise over old surveys. For instance, Tennessee and Georgia periodically dispute their border, because an 1818 survey of the states’ boundary does not accord with the official boundary. “Every 20 or 30 years, some bright legislator that doesn’t know the background of this situation . . . will say, ‘Oh, we’re missing out on some of our territory,’ ” said Savannah-based historian Farris Cadle; Lee Shearer, “Tennessee-Georgia Border Dispute Derided,” Athens Banner-Herald, March 3, 2008. See also Shaila Dewan, “Georgia Claims a Sliver of the Tennessee River,” New York Times, February 22, 2008.

68. Bedini, Thinkers and Tinkers, 254; Simeon DeWitt, “Variation of the Magnetic Needle,” American Journal of Science and Art (July 1829): 61; DeWitt, “On the Establishment of a MERIDIAN LINE,” Transactions of the Society for the Promotion of Useful Arts 4 (1819): 26. For the recent data about the magnetic shift in the early nineteenth century, I again thank Dennis Kent.

69. John Randel Jr., “Annular Eclipse of the Sun of 16th June, 1806, and 26th May, 1854,” Weekly Herald, May 20, 1854; Simeon DeWitt, “Observations on the Eclipse of 16 June, 1806,” Transactions of the American Philosophical Society 6 (1809): 300; Simeon DeWitt, “Variation of the Magnetic Needle,” American Journal of Science and Arts (July 1829): 62.

70. Minutes of the Common Council, September 5, 1808.

71. JR Field Books, 65.1, 65.4, NYHS.

72. John Randel Jr. to Mr. Thomas R. Mercein, December 3, 1813, NYC Municipal Archives; JR Field Books, 69 (1819) and 64.1, NYHS.

73. Randel cited the pamphlet in two places: on the 1821 map and in a draft letter to Peter Maverick, the engraver of the 1821 map, asking him to send copies of his drawings “that I may finish a written description of them”; JR Field Books, 64.1, NYHS.

74. Explanatory Remarks and Estimates; John Randel Jr. to Peter Mesier, October 6, 1813, NYC Archives; JR Field Books, 65.4, 69 (1819), NYHS; Randel, 1821 map of the City of New York, Library of Congress.

75. Randel, Explanatory Remarks. The angle of incline was vitally important to Randel. If he could not get a rod level, he would have to calculate triangles to get the true horizontal length. Several of Randel’s notebooks have sine and cosine tables in them so he wouldn’t have to do the calculations every time (he also used versed sines, or versines, a related formula not much used today), but the entire process still required time-consuming math. Referring to himself in the third person in a draft plea to the Common Council for more money, Randel described the labor. “If thereof he measured 2,000 feet per day after the lines were transited etc. he would have 67 triangles to calculate twice and add together to reduce that one day’s work to horizontal measure and as many more additions to reduce that measure to a medium temperature thus giving for every mile of measure 170 triangles to be calculated twice and 3,800 figures to be added together, to do which would require nearly as many hours as it required to make the measurements and . . . one half of this work was required to be done each night (when he ought to have been at rest) to enable him to advance in measuring the next day . . . by this close application he became so much impaired as to make it necessary for him to stop work early in the fall.” The Common Council wanted the work done as quickly as possible, he noted with a touch of melodrama, “least in cause of his death . . . the work might be delayed and perhaps not completed with the same care with which it was commenced.” JR Field Books, 65.4, NYHS.

76. JR Field Books, 62.3, NYHS.

77. Roy, “An Account of the Measurement,” 440, 58.

78. Hoare, Quest for the True Figure of the Earth, 157; Smith, Introduction of Geodesy, 23. Pumpkin and egg images are from Smith, 19.

79. JR Field Books, 61.2, 69 (1819), NYHS. Although Randel was conversant with spherical trigonometry, he did not use it consistently.

80. JR Field Books, 66.3, NYHS.

81. Randel surveyed north of 155th Street and set markers along Tenth Avenue. One bolt has survived on a steep, rocky, overgrown hillside.

82. JR Field Books, 69 (1816), 64.3, NYHS.

83. Minutes of the Common Council, March 10, 1817.

84. Minutes of the Common Council, March 10 and March 19, 1817.

85. JR Field Books, 63.2, 59.1, NYHS; Marino and Tiro, Along the Hudson and Mohawk, 1–2. The authors note that “quantifying spirit” is a translation of esprit géometrique, which was pervasive in eighteenth-century Europe: “Since numbers held out great promise for illuminating the workings of the natural and social orders, enlightened men and women took to measuring everything from air pressure to population. The United States would catch this fever later in the 1790s, in part through the influence of persons like [Count Paolo] Andreani.”

86. JR Field Books, 63.2, NYHS.

87. JR Field Books, 65.3; 62.3, 59.4, NYHS.

88. JR Field Books, 62.2, 69 (1819), NYHS.

89. JR Field Books, 62.2, NYHS.

90. JR Field Books, 62.2, NYHS. In a Presbyterian church genealogy, Randel’s birthday is given as December 4, 1787. But his own record contradicts that date.

91. JR Field Books, 60.4, 64.1, NYHS. On the possibility of William’s trouble with drink, see the testimony of Nathan Boulden in the Chesapeake & Delaware Canal case; Harrington, Reports of Cases Argued and Adjudged, 296.

92. Ogdena Fort, notes, Madison County Historical Society.

93. Series A0452-79, vol. 13–17, NYSA.

94. JR Field Books, 64.1, NYHS.

95. JR Field Books, 60.4, 64.1, NYHS.

96. JR Field Books, 69 (1819); 64.1, NYHS.

97. JR Field Books, 64.1, NYHS.

98. Details about the portraits can be found in the Smithsonian Institution’s Inventory of American Paintings and in Bolton and Cortelyou, Ezra Ames of Albany.

99. Ames expert Tammis K. Groft, deputy director and chief curator at the Albany Institute of History and Art, confirms that these two portraits look like Ames’s.

100. JR Field Books, 64.1, NYHS.

101. Ogdena Fort, notes, Madison County Historical Society; Ernenwein, Verona, 44.

102. Condict, Her Book, 36–37, 15, 40–41.

103. JR Field Books, 69 (1819), NYHS.

104. Ryan, Cradle of the Middle Class, 74; JR Field Books, 64.1, NYHS.

105. Klinghoffer and Elkis, “The Petticoat Electors,” 169.

106. Minutes of the Common Council, April 8, 1810; April 22, 1811; May 13, 1811; November 23, 1812; JR, New-York Evening Post, April 8, 1814.

107. New-York Evening Post, March 21, 1814.

108. Ibid.

109. New-York Evening Post, March 24, 1814.

110. New-York Evening Post, April 8, 1814.

111. JR Field Books, 67.2, NYHS; New-York Evening Post, April 8, 1814.

112. Minutes of the Common Council, May 19, 1806; Augustyn and Cohen, Manhattan in Maps, 96–99.

113. New York Commercial Advertiser, May 7 and April 28, 1808; Minutes of the Common Council, March 7, 1808 (see also New-York Evening Post, July 1, 1808); Minutes of the Common Council, April 10, 1809, and March 12, 1810.

114. Augustyn and Cohen, Manhattan in Maps, 6.

115. Hall, Travels in North America, 101; Series A4016-77, vol 1, folder 100, NYSA.

116. Series A4016-77, vol. 1, folder 100, NYSA; JR Field Notes, 69 (1819), NYHS.

117. Series A4016-77, vol. 20, folder 20, NYSA.

118. Series A4016-77, NYSA; Harrington, Reports of Cases Argued and Adjudged, 285; JR Field Books, 65.3, 69 (1819), 64.1, 65.3, NYHS; John Randel, Jr., appellant, 104; JR Field Books, Onondaga Historical Association.

119. New York Commercial Advertiser, May 25, 1813.

120. Series A4016-77, vol. 15, folder 137, NYSA.

121. Series A4016-77, vol. 1, folder 100, NYSA. According to notes from Abraham Randel’s granddaughter in the Madison County Historical Society, Oneida Castle was proposed as an alternate capital for New York, because it is in the center of the state, but it missed that designation by a vote of one in either 1815 or 1817. According to the Oneida Daily Dispatch, January 11, 2012, there were three attempts to make Oneida Castle the state capital.

122. Series A4016-77, vol. 1, folder 100, NYSA.

123. JR, “City of New York, north of Canal street,” 848.

124. Moore, “A Plain Statement,” 49.

125. Ibid., 43–44.

126. Minutes of the Common Council, November 9, 1812, and February 2, 1818.

127. JR Field Books, 69 (1819), NYHS.

128. Manuscript Group 1411, New Jersey Historical Society.

129. JR Field Books, 64.1, NYHS.

130. JR Field Books, 69 (1819), NYHS; Minutes of the Common Council, February 15, 1819. Matilda copied a few other maps for Randel, based on other surveyors’ work. They are in the collection of the New-York Historical Society.

131. Stokes, Iconography, vol. 3, 564.

132. JR to Teunis Van Vechten, September 2, 1815, Albany County Hall of Records, SARA 1-232.

133. JR Field Books, 69 (1819), NYHS.

134. On the case, see Randall against T. Van Vechten and Others in Johnson, Reports of Cases in the Supreme Court of Judicature.

135. Series A4016-77, vol. 1, folder 100, NYSA.

136. JR Field Books, 69 (1819), NYHS.

137. Series A4016-77, vol. 1, folder 100, NYSA. According to John Hessler, senior cartographic librarian in the Geography and Map Division of the Library of Congress, insets are not unusual but scrolls very much are.

138. New-York Evening Post, March 5, 1821.

139. JR Field Books, 69 (1819); 64.1 (1820), NYHS.

140. JR Field Books, 60.4, NYHS.

141. Quoted in Carey, Exhibit of the shocking oppression, 7.

III. IN WHICH ROSE-REDWOOD SURVEYS THE 1811 GRID AND MORRISON SURVEYS TODAY’S

1. Hill and Waring, “Old Wells and Water-Courses,” 370.

2. Information about various datums comes from “NGDV to NADV,” Federal Emergency Management Agency, March 2007.

3. Zelenak, “The Xs and Ys of the Big Apple.”

4. Rose-Redwood read Zelenak’s article, which cited Koop. Koop, Precise Leveling in New York City, 71–72. According to Zelenak, Randel set the elevation at First Avenue and 27th Street because he thought that would be the center of the city as it grew.

5. Moore, A Plain Statement, 23.

6. Schuyler, New Urban Landscape, 23; Hartog, Public Property and Private Power, 159, 162.

7. Quoted in Jaye and Vatts, Literature and the American Urban Experience, 88.

8. Quoted in Rose-Redwood, “Rationalizing the Landscape,” 104.

9. Quoted in Jackson and Dunbar, Empire City, 208; Schuyler, New Urban Landscape, 23.

10. Morris, DeWitt, and Rutherford, “Remarks of the Commissioners for Laying Out Streets and Roads in the City of New York”; Heckscher, Creating Central Park, 9; Isenberg, Nature of Cities, 95.

11. Rosenzweig and Blackmar, The Park and The People,135; Kostoff, The City Shaped, 74.

12. Simutis, “Frederick Law Olmsted,” 281–82.

13. Quoted in Jackson and Dunbar, Empire City, 278–79.

14. Reps, The Making of Urban America, 299; Marcuse, “The Grid as City Plan,” 287. It is interesting to note that very similar criticisms were made of the grids originating from the 1785 Land Ordinance. Landscape architect Horace Cleveland wrote in 1871 that “the monotonous character of their rectangular streets, which on level ground is simply tedious in its persistent uniformity, becomes actually hideous when it sets at defiance the plainest suggestion of natural topography and sacrifices every feature of natural beauty and every opportunity for picturesque effect in its blind adherence to geometrical lines.” See Johnson, Order Upon the Land, 177.

15. Shanor, “New York’s Paper Streets,” 8–9; Rose-Redwood, “Rationalizing the Landscape,” 62.

16. Morris, DeWitt, and Rutherford, “Remarks of the Commissioners for Laying Out Streets and Roads in the City of New York.”

17. See Kostof, The City Shaped, 95: “The grid—or gridiron or checkerboard—is by far the commonest pattern for planned cities in history.”

18. Hartog, Public Property and Private Power, 163, 165–66.

19. Cohen, A Calculating People, 149.

20. Rose-Redwood, “Rationalizing the Landscape,” 74, 85.,

21. Adams, Gouverneur Morris, 282.

22. DeWitt, Element of Perspective, xix.

23. Rose-Redwood, “Rationalizing the Landscape,” 85, 94. A similar argument was made by Elizabeth Blackmar in Manhattan for Rent. She notes that the grid suggested a revival of classical taste, which found beauty in symmetry and balance.

24. DeWitt, Elements of Perspective, 4, 25, 28.

25. Ibid.; Series A4016-77, vol. 1, folder 100, NYSA.

26. Rose-Redwood, “Rationalizing the Landscape,” 94.

27. Rose-Redwood and Li, “From Island of Hills,” 403.

28. This example is based on a helpful NOVA website called “GPS: The New Navigation.”

IV. IN WHICH RANDEL KEEPS SEEKING THE MOST ELIGIBLE ROUTES

1. Mathew Carey, Diary 1822–1826, November 2 and 22, 1825, Carey Collection, Library Company of Philadelphia, and the University of Pennsylvania Rare Book and Manuscript Library. In his November 22 entry, Carey states that all his effort has been “all to no purpose.” But it was too early to conclude that.

2. Hall, Travels in North America, 153, 154–55.

3. Gallatin, “Report of the Secretary of the Treasury,” 5, 8.

4. Ibid., 118.

5. Ibid., 85; Rubin, Canal or Railroad?, 9.

6. New Jersey Legislature, Report of the Commissioners, 12.

7. New York State, Report of the Commissioners Appointed by Joint Resolutions, 26–27, Albany Institute for History and Art; Larson, Internal Improvement, 76.

8. Hall, Travels in North America, 136.

9. Stilgoe, Common Landscape of America, 115. The figure for the tolls is for the Erie Canal and the feeder canals; Hood, 722 Miles, 34.

10. JR Field Books, 64.1, NYHS; Dewitt quoted in Carey, Exhibit of the shocking oppression, 7.

11. Larson, Internal Improvement, 4.

12. JR Field Books, 64.1, NYHS.

13. JR Field Books, 69 (1819), NYHS.

14. JR Field Books, 1821–1836, Onondaga Historical Association.

15. JR Field Books, 69 (1819), NYHS.

16. New York State, “Report of the Commissioners,” 16, Albany Institute of History and Art.

17. JR Field Books, 69 (1819), NYHS.

18. JR Field Books, 1821–1836, Onondaga Historical Association; JR, Description of a Direct Route for the Erie Canal, 5.

19. JR Field Books, 64.1, NYHS.

20. JR Field Books, 64.1, NYHS. In this instance, Randel publicly stated several months later that Wright did not respond to his letters, so it seems reasonable to conclude that these two letters were sent in some form.

21. JR Field Books, Onondaga Historical Association; JR Field Books, 64.1, 64.10, NYHS.

22. “The Canal,” Albany Argus, February 15, 1822.

23. Randel, Description of a Direct Route for the Erie Canal, 4.

24. Ibid., 8, 3; Calhoun, American Civil Engineer, 57.

25. Randel, Description of a Direct Route for the Erie Canal, 15.

26. JR Field Books, 69 (1819), NYHS.

27. JR Field Books, 69 (1819), NYHS.

28. Ibid. The troughs for loading boats come up frequently: in the field books in the summer of 1821, in the published Erie pamphlet, and during the Chesapeake & Delaware Canal work. Randel seemed well pleased with the idea, eager to see it tested.

29. Ibid.

30. JR Field Books, 64.1, NYHS.

31. John Randel Jr. to Bernard Peyton, December 26, 1822, and February 1, 1823, Library of Virginia. .

32. Gray, National Waterway. Gray’s book is the major work of scholarship on this canal. It was only 14 miles long but made “possible continuous navigation along more than 600 miles of the Atlantic Coast without venturing to sea” (xvii).

33. Chesapeake & Delaware Canal directors to DeWitt Clinton, March 12, 1822, Chesapeake & Delaware Canal Papers, Delaware Historical Society; JR to J. Gilpin, March 17, 1823, C & D Canal Papers, Delaware Historical Society; JR Field Books, 64.1, NYHS.

34. JR Field Books, 64.1, NYHS.

35. Henry D. Gilpin to Joshua Gilpin, January 20, 1823, Gilpin Collection, Delaware Historical Society; Gray, National Waterway, 51.

36. Henry D. Gilpin to Joshua Gilpin, May 26 and 29, 1823, Gilpin Collection, Delaware Historical Society.

37. JR Field Books 64.1, NYHS.

38. Henry D. Gilpin to JR, August 20 and November 4, 1823, C & D Canal Papers, Delaware Historical Society.

39. John Randel Jr., “To Canal Contractors,” Times and Hartford Advertiser, March 30, 1824; Gray, National Waterway, 52, 56.

40. Gray, National Waterway, 57; Harrington, Reports of Cases Argued and Adjudged, 292.

41. Benjamin Wright to John B. Jervis, July 9, 1824, Jervis Papers, Jervis Public Library, Rome, NY. The identity of Old Father Putnam is unknown.

42. Harrington, Reports of Cases Argued and Adjudged, 297.

43. Gray, National Waterway, 58; Harrington, Reports of Cases Argued and Adjudged, 298.

44. Harrington, Reports of Cases Argued and Adjudged, 301.

45. Ibid., 293, 308–9. Cupping was a medical practice during which physicians would heat up the air inside a cup and then hold the cup face-down against the skin. As the air cooled, the idea went, it created a vacuum and pulled bad materials out of the skin and into the cup.

46. Henry D. Gilpin to Joshua Gilpin, October 1, 1825, Gilpin Collection, Delaware Historical Society.

47. Benjamin Wright to John B. Jervis, September 11 and November 20, 1825, Jervis Papers, Jervis Public Library, Rome, NY.

48. Quoted in Carey, Exhibit of the shocking oppression and injustice, 22–23.

49. Harrington, Reports of Cases Argued and Adjudged, 257.

50. Carey, “Protest,” October 8, 1825, Library Company of Philadelphia.

51. Ibid.

52. See Koeppel, Bond of Union, 204–5: “We feel very much dissatisfied with the conduct of Mr. Wright.”

53. A Stockholder, “Reply to Mr. Carey’s Appeal,” 2–3, Library Company of Pennsylvania; New-York Spectator, June 24, 1831.

54. Carey, Exhibit of the shocking oppression and injustice, 2, Library Company of Philadelphia. “When he arrived in Philadelphia, he ranked high in honour and reputation in his native state, New York, where he enjoyed the friendship and confidence of some of the most distinguished characters, who duly appreciated his energy and his talents—he was possessed of an independent fortune—in excellent health—a bright career of prosperity open before him . . . In a word, however ardent his ambition, there were few men with whom he could wish to change situations. Such was John Randel! What is he now? His reputation assailed by foul calumny, his professional talents depreciated; his fortunes and projects blasted . . .”—and on Carey goes.

55. Ibid., 6.

56. Carey, Autobiography, 4, 9, vi; Carey, “Essays on the Public Charities,” 1.

57. Mathew Carey, diary, November 28, 1825, Library Company of Philadelphia, and the Rare Book and Manuscript Library, University of Pennsylvania; John Sergeant to Mathew Carey, 1825, Edward Carey Gardiner Collection, Historical Society of Pennsylvania.

58. Calhoun, American Civil Engineer, 98, 95.

59. Gray, National Waterway, 56.

60. John Randel, Jr., appellant, vs. William Linn Brown, 97.

61. Ibid., 87.

62. Daily National Intelligencer, June 3, 1831.

63. Harrington, Reports of Cases Argued and Adjudged, 43.

64. Howard, Reports of Cases Argued, 407; Harrington, Reports of Cases Argued and Adjudged, 178.

65. “Randel, Junior, vs. the Chesapeake and Delaware Canal Company,” National Gazette, January 30, 1834.

66. Baltimore Gazette and Daily Advertiser, January 29, 1834; Comegys, Memoir of John M. Clayton, 16, 26–27.

67. Harrington, Reports of Cases Argued and Adjudged, 285, 289–90.

68. Bayard Collection, Box 61, folder 17, Delaware Historical Society.

69. Harrington, Reports of Cases Argued and Adjudged, 306–7.

70. National Gazette, January 30, 1834.

71. Carey, Exhibit of the shocking oppression and injustice, 7.

72. John Randel, Jr., appellant, vs. William Linn Brown, 111.

73. Ibid., 160.

74. Ibid., 100.

75. Rundell, American Domestic Cookery, 1, 8, American Antiquarian Society.

76. Quoted in Gifford, Cecil County Maryland, 140; Rundell, American Domestic Cookery, 111.

77. Charles Ellet to Mary Ellet, June 15 and November 4, 1827, Ellet Papers, Special Collections Library, University of Michigan. Randel apparently liked Ellet too. He wrote a letter of recommendation for him in 1828: “I found him to be a young gentleman of amiable manners, industrious habits; of strict integrity, sound discretion and good judgment; and he now has considerable experience in his profession: he is deserving of public and private confidence.” See Lewis, Charles Ellet, Jr., 13.

78. Larson, Internal Improvements, 225.

79. JR, “Railroad Experiments,” Baltimore Gazette and Daily Advertiser, July 9, 1832; JR, report to the president and directors, July 4, 1832, New Castle & Frenchtown Railway Papers, Delaware Historical Society.

80. JR, report to the president and directors, July 4, 1832, New Castle & Frenchtown Railway Papers, Delaware Historical Society.

81. Ibid.

82. Ibid.

83. Lankton, “New Castle and Frenchtown Railroad,” 8.

84. The first U.S. railroad to use an engine was the Mohawk and Hudson, just five years before work began on the New Castle & Frenchtown. William F. Holmes’s assessment of the New Castle & Frenchtown is more charitable than Lankton’s. In “The New Castle and Frenchtown Turnpike and Railroad Company,” Holmes contextualizes the company’s challenges: “The building of a railroad—even though it was to be only a sixteen-and-a-half-mile track—presented a formidable problem in 1830 . . . But there were few railroad companies in the world to which the New Castle men could turn to for advice, and therefore they would have to be pioneers in helping to develop a new mode of transportation” (165–66).

85. Quoted in Hayman, Rails Along the Chesapeake, 7. Randel’s great-nephew William R. Weeks was later piqued by Johnston’s description. Writing in 1915, in response to an article about the railroad that cited Johnston, Weeks maintains that he has all Randel’s papers—including a Reminiscence of John Randel Jr. written for his son, John Massey Randel—and that Randel’s own account in that reminiscence indubitably reveals his skill, his “bull-dog tenacity,” and “his usual thoroughness and progressive spirit.” See Weeks, “Interesting Data.”

86. Hayman, Rails Along the Chesapeake, 11.

87. Report of the President and Directors to the Stockholders of the Ithaca and Owego Rail Road Company, 104, American Antiquarian Society.

88. Weeks, “Interesting Data,” 442.

89. New-York Spectator, March 3, 1834, citing the Albany Daily Advertiser.

90. New-York Spectator, July 15, 1831.

91. JR to William D. Lewis, February 7, 1832, New Castle & Frenchtown Railway Papers, Delaware Historical Society; New-York Spectator, July 22 and August 1, 1833.

92. Quoted in Burns, “History of the Ithaca and Owego Railroad,” 39–40.

93. JR, “Report of the Engineer in Chief”; A. Merrill, “First Passenger Train in America,” n.p.

94. A. Merrill, “First Passenger Railway in America,” n.p.

95. J. Merrill, “History of the Development of the Early Railroad System,” n.p.

96. Cmaylo et al., Images of America: Verona; notes, Madison County Historical Society.

97. JR, “Report of the Engineer in Chief”; Lee, A History of Railroads in Tompkins County, 7.

98. Dixon, “Central Railroad of Georgia,” 54–55. Randel was approached by other railroad interests during the 1830s as well. Elkannah Watson, a prominent Albany businessman, wrote to Randel several times requesting his services on a short, proposed line between Port Kent and Keeseville; E. Watson to J. Randel, April 30, 1832, April 6, 1833, and April 29, 1835, New York State Library, Manuscripts and Special Collections.

99. JR, “Chesapeake and Delaware Canal,” Niles Weekly Register, February 28, 1835.

100. John Randel, Jr., appellant, vs. William Linn Brown, 87, 122, 66.

101. Ibid., 64–65.

102. JR, “Chesapeake and Delaware Canal,” Niles Weekly Register, February 28, 1835.

103. “Randel and the Chesapeake and Delaware Canal,” Niles Weekly Register, February 20, 1835.

104. John Randel, Jr., appellant, vs. William Linn Brown, 57.

105. Ibid., 18; Richard Varick DeWitt to John M. Clayton, March 14, 1843, Manuscript Division, Library of Congress. DeWitt wrote that he wished to close his accounts with Randel and was trying to track down a confidential agreement he had made with Randel “at a time when he had neither security to give, nor credit, nor friends to help him on in his suits against the Canal Company or Judge Wright.”

106. Simeon DeWitt to Stephen Van Rensselaer, October 20, 1834, Rutgers University Archives.

107. New York State Assembly Report No. 209, April 2, 1849.

108. Orville L. Holley to JR, Series A4016-77, vol. 11, folders 33, 35, and 37, NYSA.

109. Ibid.

110. Although no record of their relationship has turned up, Randel had a great deal in common with his nephew. By 1839 Jesse had surveyed part of Texas with Richard S. Hunt, issuing a now famous and rare early map. “One of the seminal maps of the Republic period, this fascinating piece of cartography illustrated in bold details everything from original roads to early counties to the location of roaming wild horses and silver mines!” wrote a Texas state archivist. Jesse and Hunt published The New Guide to Texas (New York: J. Colton, 1839), the first guide for settlers of the new state, which “became standard for American settlers,” according to Going to Texas: Five Centuries of Texas Maps (Fort Worth: Texas Christian University Press, 2007). In what sound like his uncle’s words, Jesse (and Hunt) note that their map and guide are the only ones based on “accurate” surveys.

111. Mann, Republic of Debtors, 3.

112. Quoted in Boydston, Home and Work, 72.

113. George Washington to Simeon DeWitt, August 29, 1781, Rutgers University Archives.

114. Johnston, History of Cecil County, 391–92.

115. Ibid., 391; James McCauley, diary, May 19, 1857, Historical Society of Cecil County.

116. Johnston, History of Cecil County, 391.

117. JR to James Clayton, June 22, 1849, Manuscript Division, Library of Congress.

118. James McCauley, diary, 1858, Historical Society of Cecil County.

119. Randal v. Howard, U.S. Supreme Court Cases & Opinions, vol. 67, 1862. http://supreme.justia.com/cases/federal/us/67/585/case.html.

V. IN WHICH MANNAHATTA LIFTS OFF

1. Nash, Wilderness and the American Mind, 43. “Wilderness was the basic ingredient of American culture. From the raw materials of the physical wilderness, Americans built a civilization. With the idea of wilderness they sought to give their civilization identity and meaning” (xi).

2. For more on the country’s early attitudes toward nature, see Judd, Untilled Garden.

3. Marsh, Man and Nature, 36.

4. Cronon, Changes in the Land, 122.

5. Marsh, Man and Nature, 35.

6. An account of Olmsted hearing Marsh lecture can be found in Roper, FLO, 11. But Mark Stoll of Texas Tech University, who is looking into this claim, has not been able to verify it. Spirn, “The Authority of Nature,” 104; quoted in Brookline GreenSpace Alliance, Fall 2009, 6. www.brooklinegreenspace.org/index.html.

7. Augustyn and Cohen, Manhattan in Maps, 84.

8. The Mohawk name for the island did honor the many wetlands: gänóno means “reeds” or “place of reeds.” See Shorto, Island, 42.

9. Kassulke, “See Wisconsin Through the Eyes of 19th-Century Surveyors.” Mullett’s and many other surveyors’ entries can be viewed on Wisconsin’s Board of Commissioners of Public Lands website, http://digicoll.library.wisc.edu/cgi-bin/SurveyNotes/SurveyNotes-idx?type=div&byte=78113&isize=L&twp=T010NR007E.

10. Viele, Topography and Hydrology of New York, 4, 12.

11. For a reproduction of Viele’s water map and for Viele’s use of Randel’s data, see Augustyn and Cohen, Manhattan in Maps, 136–39. On flooding, see Steven Kurutz, “When There Was Water, Water Everywhere,” New York Times, June 11, 2006.

12. Robert Juet, Purchas His Pilgrimes (1624), 591–92, http://documents.nytimes.com/robert-juet-s-journal-of-hudson-s-1609-voyage.

13. Burrows and Wallace, Gotham, 3–4.

14. Wilson, Biophilia, 22.

15. The quadrat appears to have first been used as an ecological tool by H. Hoffman in 1879 in Germany, but at a very large scale: each quadrat was 21.4 square kilometers; Tobey, Saving the Prairies, 51.

16. Others have felt Sanderson’s impulse. In 1978 The New Yorker carried a piece about artist Alan Sonfist, who restored a corner of original Manhattan. Sonfist had grown up near the Bronx River and, as the article describes, loved being in the woods there: “He felt that the trees were as alive as he was, he wondered whether the rocks had a language of their own, and he understood that human beings don’t have to use a forest, or ever do anything in a forest to enjoy themselves: they only have to be there, and look and listen.” Sonfist reconstructed three slices of New York’s pre-European landscape—a meadow, a young forest, and a mature forest—using native species, whose names he gleaned from historical research. Today his Time Landscape endures at the intersection of LaGuardia Place and West Houston Street. In the early 1990s archaeologist and GIS expert Joel W. Grossman began designing virtual reconstructions of Manhattan’s seventeenth-century vegetation and animal life. His three-dimensional images—incorporating information from paleobotanical records, excavations of Dutch gardens in lower Manhattan, and his own topographical ground-truthing—portray the island green and hilly with trees, waterways and soaring birds; see www.geospatialarchaeology.com/3dnyc.html.

17. Mannahatta has continued to evolve since 2009. In 2010 Mannahatta was incorporated into Welikia (the Lenape word for “my good home”), which will describe the historical ecology of the other four boroughs as well. Doing this is both more and less complicated, Sanderson notes. The GIS model already exists, so he doesn’t have to build one; on the other hand, there is no British Headquarters Map or Randel information for the other boroughs, no single surveyor or cartographer with the necessary topographical and hydrological data. In 2011 the Rockefeller Foundation funded Sanderson to build an interactive 2409 site, which will enable New Yorkers to visualize how lifestyle, urban planning, restoration ecology, and other elements can alter how much carbon they release. And Colleen Macklin, her students at Parsons New School for Design, and Sanderson just created a prototype of Mannahatta: The Game for iPhone. Players can rise through the ranks as “Eco-Masters” if they travel the island with an ecologically savvy eye, making ecologically savvy choices.

18. I am grateful to paleontologist Paul E. Olsen of Columbia University for his wonderful work and lectures on this topic, and for sharing this surprising fossil site in New Jersey with the M.A. science journalism seminar.

VI. IN WHICH IS DESCRIBED “THE INGENUITY OF THE NEW”

1. New York City Crystal Palace Records, Box 28a, folder 3, NYHS; Post, “Reflections of American Science and Technology,” 338.

2. Post, “Reflections of American Science and Technology,” 338.

3. Proceedings of the Board of Aldermen (Bryant & Co.), vol. 30, February 19 and March 23, 1846.

4. “Elevated Railway in Broadway,” Daily National Intelligencer, November 4, 1847. Another newspaper article gives different dimensions and cost; according to the Cleveland Herald on August 2, 1847, Randel’s model was 31 feet long and cost $3,000. And the American Railroad Journal and General Advertiser of July 24, 1847, reported that Randel intended to take his model to London “where a patent has been secured.” Science historian and patent expert Daniel Kevles of Yale University notes that American inventors would often seek to protect an invention by patenting it in England if they thought there were already U.S. patents on the design. According to the U.K.’s intellectual property office, there is no record of such a Randel patent. The U.S. Patent and Trademark Office does not appear to have his patent either.

5. JR, Elevated Railway, 10.

6. JR, Explanatory Remarks and Estimates, 6–8, 12; Peterson, “The Sofa Elevator,” 31; JR, Elevated Railway, 13.

7. Burrows and Wallace, History of New York City, 786–87; “View of Broadway in the city of New York,” lithograph by Robert J. Raynor, I. N. Phelps Stokes Collection of American Historical Prints, New York Public Library. The elevated railway description provides the most complete of just three records of Randel’s involvement with public works projects. In 1836—as noted in Chapter IV—he had presented a report to the Baltimore city government on water supply, suggesting where to best to run pipes into the city and from which source. His other, and final, engagement with utilities may have arisen directly out of the elevated railway proposal and Randel’s knowledge that New York City’s government was trying to address the sewage disaster by building new pipelines and repairing and redesigning older, ineffective ones. In February 1854 he approached the Board of Aldermen with an idea for sewer, water, and gas pipe chambers running under the street. His petition seems to have been picked up or commissioned by professor Lewis A. Sayre, a resident physician for New York City and a founder of the American Medical Association. Sayre suggested a system of sewer, water, and gas pipelines that would run under the streets and sidewalks and would be accessible via trapdoors; Randel, “one of the ablest civil engineers the country has ever produced,” drew up or designed Sayre’s plans. The plans sound remarkably similar to those Randel depicted in his 1848 elevated railway proposal; they are described in “The Sanitary Topography of New York City” in The Catholic World: A Monthly Magazine and General Literature and Science 10, no. 59 (December 1869).

8. Proceedings of the Board of Aldermen, vol. 34, December 6, 1847.

9. JR, Elevated Railway, 18–19.

10. New York Tribune, December 28, 1853; “City Items,” New York Tribune, June 8, 1849; Proceedings of the Board of Aldermen, vol. 37, June 13, 1849.

11. JR to John M. Clayton, June 22, 1849, Manuscript Division, Library of Congress. Morrisania, he described, would be more luxurious and spacious than New York City: “The avenues on New York island are all 100 feet wide & the cross streets at right angles thereto 60 feet wide . . . While in Morrisania City, the avenues are laid out 200 feet wide, with Parks for trees and tasteful shrubbery, 80 feet in width in the middle, leaving a street 60 feet wide on each side of it.”

12. “A New Broadway Over Broadway,” New York Tribune, June 11, 1853; “An Elevated Railway for Broadway,” New York Tribune, June 21, 1853; “Elevated Broadway Railroad,” New York Tribune, June 28, 1853.

13. “An Elevated Railway for Broadway,” New York Tribune, July 25, 1853; “City Railroads—Broken Car Wheels,” New York Tribune, September 7, 1853.

14. “Relief for Broadway,” New York Tribune, December 28, 1853; “Randel’s Elevated Broadway and Promenade: Notice,” New York Daily Times, July 17, 1854; Transactions of the American Institute of the City of New York for the Year 1855, 109; “Science, Mechanics, and the Fine Arts,” Daily National Intelligencer, October 16, 1855.

15. Quoted in Hornung, The Way It Was, 118. The entire editorial or unsigned letter appeared in the New York Herald-Tribune on February 2, 1866.

16. Hood, 722 Miles, 49. The elevated lines contributed to the expansion of the city, allowing more commuters to work and live in different places, and were popular with those who rode them. But to many others they were an unsightly, ungainly solution to transportation problems. “The elevated structures darkened and obstructed the streets, and passing trains at the level of second stories were extremely noisy. Locomotives’ stacks issued smoke and cinders, while passing trains dripped lubricating oil down onto the street; altogether the lines were a remarkable intrusion on urban neighborhoods, built for the convenience of those who passed through at the expense of those who lived there.” Stradling, Nature of New York, 112.

17. Proceedings of the Board of Aldermen, vol. 92, October 5, October 12, October 26, and November 12, 1863; vol. 94, May 30, 1864. See also City Clerk papers from 1863, New York Municipal Archives.

18. Randel, “Old New York Revived,” 27–30. The date given for Randel’s contribution is June 1867, but that must be a mistake, because the August 19, 1865, New York Herald-Tribune reports Randel’s death as occurring in Albany on August 2. An Albany database gives August 1. Brain inflammation may have been encephalitis or typhus. See Munsell, Annals of Albany, regarding the Orange, N.J., burial.

19. Potter, Hairdresser’s Experience, 91. The identification of John Randel Jr. comes in the recent annotated version; see Santamarina, Hairdresser’s Experience, 205.

20. “The outcome is a dazzlingly precise creative unity,” writes John Kouwenhoven of the Manhattan skyline; Beer Can by the Highway, 52.

21. The similarities between this photograph and Randel’s portrait by Ezra Ames are striking, and the name, date, and place all correspond. But the black-and-white scan of the portrait is unclear in some details (such as eye color). And there is always a chance this photograph is of another John Randel in 1854.