Remember These? Parchment Maps & Documents

Parchment map of the AWI battlefields and a brass trivet that I purchased at Colonial Williamsburg
(it is the coat of arms of King George III)

A view of the parchment map without the photo staging.

I was sorting through the accumulated junk in my Man Cave this morning, when I found some of those old parchment maps in a box. You probably remember these: they were prints of copies of the US Constitution, Declaration of Independence, Colonial Currency, and battlefield maps. These first appeared in the early 1960s as part of the American Civil War Centennial celebration (1961 - 1965).

The company that produced the maps did something that appeared to age the parchment paper, giving it a brownish hue that made the document look like an old find.

These were fun to collect and I had a large collection of parchement documents when I was a young lad. I bought this map and some reproduction Colonial currency when I visited the Saratoga National Military Park circa 2000 (or it might have been purchased at nearby Fort Ticonderoga). 

I want to post it on the wall in my Man Cave, but the wall space is fairly well used up and I don't want to make things look cluttered with too many pictures and posters.

I hope that these images bring back some fond memories for you too. They make me want to break out my AWI figures again 

Maps of Silesia

Silesia map - circa 1561

I was doing a search for some maps of Silesia, circa the 18th Century, to use as the basis for a campaign map of this theater of war. I thought that my readers would enjoy looking at them and considering how they might use these maps for their own purposes.

The map at the top of the page, circa 1561, is particularly colorful. Breslau and the Oder River are at the bottom of the map and Bohemia, trans mountains in white, is at the top of the map. This is kind of backwards from how we normally view such maps.

The second map is a really good one of Silesia, but alas, I could not make it very large  and it is a bit out of focus, making it difficult to read.

Silesia Map

The third map, below, is one that I intend to use as a photo background for when I take pictures of newly painted battalions for my Prussian armies. It can be printed either in color, as a sepia or in black and white. The sepia version has a good "old" look to it. You can download the map and play around with the coloring in your picture application (iPhotos if you have a Mac computer).

Theater Map of the Seven Years War showing the main domains of Brandenburg, Silesia, and Bohemia.
This map makes for a good background for photographs of units, especially if printed in black and white.

I have always been intrigued with maps and enjoy looking at them and analyzing them in greater detail. I will be posting more maps in the future. I'm looking for a good local map of the Kunersdorf-Paltzig area and one of Poland around the town of Posen. The latter map will provide some context for a raid into Poland to destroy Russian magazines at Posen.

The Best Maps for Wargamers Ever!

The Battle of Spotsylvania, by David Greenspan

DOUBLE CLICK ON ALL MAPS

I
'm sure that most of my readers will be familiar with the wonderfully animated and detailed maps that were created by David Greenspan and published in the American Heritage Pictorial History of the Civil War, by Bruce Catton.

These were more than maps to me when I was an eight-year old boy who was just starting to get interested in the Civil War (sorry my friends, but there are civil wars but there is only one Civil War and that was the one fought from 1861 to 1865 in the United States).

Each map was a veritable diorama of a particular battle, showing the little men as they moved back and forth across the battlefield. Since I was already playing with toy soldiers, the little figures and the colorful buidings and terrain captivated me like nothing else. Anytime I was reading about a Civil War battlefield I would pull my copy of Catton's book off of the bookshelf and pour over the battlemap to give me a better understanding of what happened. Truth be told though, it wasn't the understanding that compelled me to look, it was another opportunity to look at all of those little soldiers again.

I never got tired of looking carefully at the map and finding some vignette for the first time, be it some soldiers being held prisoner, an artillery battery unlimbering or a column of troops marching toward the sound of the guns. It occurs to me that one could use the Greenspan illustrations as the basis for replication of the terrain for one of our wargames.  For example, I could use the Spotsylvania or Gettysburg terrain shown on the map but use it for a battle in the AWI or SYW eras.

I only recently found a copy of a map that Greenspan illustrated for the Battle of Freeman's Farm from the American Revolution. I know that I had seen this map a long time ago, but I had forgotten that the artist had done some maps for the AWI battles.

The Battle of Freeman's Farm, by David Greenspan

There is not much known about the artist, David Greenspan, but I would like to take this opportunity to thank him for his work and to let him know how inspirational they were to me then, as well as now.

I am sure that everyone reading this will be nodding their heads in agreement as this article stirs up some wonderful memories from a long time ago.