Lewis Evans (c. 1700 –12 June 1756) [1] was a Welsh surveyor and geographer. He had a brother John. In the mid-1730s he emigrated to British America, where he was based in Philadelphia. He was well known for his 1755 map of the Middle British Colonies.
Lewis Evans was born in Caernarfonshire, Wales. He travelled to the British colonies in North America, where he settled in Philadelphia by the mid-1730s. In 1736 he bought a book from Benjamin Franklin, a printer, which was the start of their friendship. Franklin encouraged his geographic and scientific research. In 1743 Evans married Martha Hoskins, a friend of Franklin's wife Deborah Read Franklin. They had a daughter Amelia before Martha died in 1754, when the girl was ten. [2]
As a surveyor, Evans traveled in the Onondaga country of the Iroquois in western New York province with Conrad Weiser, an important interpreter who had lived as a youth with the Mohawk, and botanist John Bartram. From this trip, he published a map of New York, New Jersey and Delaware. It was modified to include Pennsylvania and published as A Map of Pensilvania, New-Jersey, New-York, and the Three Delaware Counties (1749, revised 1752). [3]
In 1751 Evans taught a class in geography and natural philosophy, as it was known, in Philadelphia, Newark, and New York. [2]
In his A General Map of the Middle British Colonies in America (1755), Evans expanded his reach to include Pennsylvania, Virginia, Maryland, and part of New England. He published this map in his book Geographical Essays (formally, Geographical, Historical, Philosophical and Mechanical Essays Containing an Analysis of a General Map of the Middle British Colonies in America, and the Country of the Confederate Indians, with a General Map of the Middle British Colonies in America), also published in 1755 by Franklin and David Hall, as the first part of an unfinished work. Still cited, this work was recently noted by Marco Platania in an article in the electronic review Cromohs. [2] The work was heavily criticised by the New York Mercury. [1]
British colonial observer Thomas Pownall, secretary to Governor Danvers Osborne of New York, stayed in the colonies after Osborne's death in 1753 to study conditions, hoping to gain another position. He had met Benjamin Franklin and helped finance publication of the map by Evans, as both men considered it critical during the French and Indian War. The British were having to confront French forces in the interior of the colonies. Evans's map was highly regarded and used by General Edward Braddock during the war; Pownall received most of the public acclaim for it at the time. [4]
Evans died in New York in June 1756. His body was returned to Philadelphia, where he was buried in the noted Christ Church Burial Ground, now listed on the National Register of Historic Places.
Evans's wife had died in 1754. He entrusted care of their daughter Amelia (Philadelphia, 1744 – Hythe, Southampton, 1835) to his brother John, who had followed him to the colony. John Evans died in 1759, and Amelia was brought up by Deborah and Benjamin Franklin. At eighteen she traveled to London for a period. Later she lived in Tunis, where she worked as a tutor to the three daughters of the British consul, James Traill and his wife. [2]
There Amelia Evans met and married in 1770 a captain of the Irish Merchant marine, David Barry. He was particularly experienced in the areas of Bordeaux and the Médoc, from where he shipped wines to Ireland. They had five children together, among them their daughter Anna Africana Barry, who married a Swiss merchant in Livorno named Rodolfo Schintz. After Evans died in Pisa, he was buried in the Old English Cemetery, Livorno in 1781.
The widow Amelia Evans Barry anonymously published a novel, Memoirs of Maria, a Persian Slave (1790), financed by subscription. She was known to have had some earlier works, also anonymous, but most have not been found. [2] The painter and engraver Alfredo Müller (1869–1939), and his brother Rodolfo (1876–1947), a cycling champion, are among her descendants. They were Swiss, born in Herisau, canton de l'Appenzell des Rhodes Extérieures. Afredo later acquired French citizenship. [5]
The Mid-Atlantic is a region of the United States located in the overlap between the Northeastern and Southeastern states of the United States. Its exact definition differs upon source, but the region typically includes Delaware, the District of Columbia, Maryland, New Jersey, New York, Pennsylvania, Virginia, and West Virginia with other sources including or excluding other states or areas in the Northeast and Southeast. The region has its origin in the Middle Colonies of the 18th century, its states being among the Thirteen Colonies of pre-revolutionary British America. As of the 2020 census, the region had a population of 60,783,913, representing slightly over 18% of the nation's population.
The Middle Colonies were a subset of the Thirteen Colonies in British America, located between the New England Colonies and the Southern Colonies. Along with the Chesapeake Colonies, this area now roughly makes up the Mid-Atlantic states.
Thomas Pownall was a British colonial official and politician. He was governor of the Province of Massachusetts Bay from 1757 to 1760, and afterwards sat in the House of Commons from 1767 to 1780. He travelled widely in the North American colonies prior to the American Revolutionary War, opposed Parliamentary attempts to tax the colonies, and was a minority advocate of colonial positions until the Revolution.
Events from the year 1755 in Canada.
Thomas Godfrey was a glazier and self-taught mathematician and astronomer in the Pennsylvania Colony, who invented the octant in 1730. A similar octant was also independently invented about the same time by John Hadley in London with Hadley receiving the greater share of the credit for development.
Christ Church Burial Ground in Philadelphia is an important early-American cemetery. It is the final resting place of Benjamin Franklin and his wife, Deborah. Four other signers of the Declaration of Independence are buried here, Benjamin Rush, Francis Hopkinson, Joseph Hewes, and George Ross. Two additional signers of the Declaration of Independence, James Wilson and Robert Morris, are buried at Christ Church just a few blocks away.
Thomas Holme (1624–1695) was the first surveyor general of the colonial-era Province of Pennsylvania. He laid out the first and original plan for the city of Philadelphia. Holme was a member of the Valiant Sixty, a group of early leaders and activists in the Religious Society of Friends, known as the Quakers.
The Boston Gazette (1719–1798) was a newspaper published in Boston, in the British North American colonies. It was a weekly newspaper established by William Brooker, who was just appointed Postmaster of Boston, with its first issue released on December 21, 1719. The Boston Gazette is widely considered the most influential newspaper in early American history, especially in the years leading up to and into the American Revolution. In 1741 the Boston Gazette incorporated the New-England Weekly Journal, founded by Samuel Kneeland, and became the Boston-Gazette, or New-England Weekly Journal. Contributors included: Samuel Adams, Paul Revere, Phyllis Wheatley.
The Mitchell Map is a map made by John Mitchell (1711–1768), which was reprinted several times during the second half of the 18th century. The map, formally titled A map of the British and French dominions in North America &c., was used as a primary map source during the Treaty of Paris for defining the boundaries of the newly independent United States. The map remained important for resolving border disputes between the United States and Canada as recently as the 1980s dispute over the Gulf of Maine fisheries. The Mitchell Map is the most comprehensive map of eastern North America made during the colonial era. Its size is about 6.5 feet (2.0 m) wide by 4.5 feet (1.4 m) high.
Joshua Fisher was a prominent Philadelphia merchant involved in transatlantic trade and mapmaking as applied to nautical charts. He made the first nautical chart of the Delaware River and Delaware Bay, and established the first merchant packet line between London and Philadelphia.
William Coleman was a merchant, lawyer, municipal official, and judge in colonial Philadelphia.
Corson Inlet is a narrow strait on the southern coast of New Jersey in the United States.
William Goddard was an early American patriot, publisher, printer and postal inspector. Born in New London, Connecticut, Goddard lived through the American Revolution and American Revolutionary War, during which he opposed British rule of the colonies through his actions and publications. He was a major figure in the development of the colonial postal system, which became the U.S. Post Office after the American Revolution.
Townsends Inlet is an inlet connecting Townsend Sound with the Atlantic Ocean in Cape May County, New Jersey.
Cape May Inlet is an inlet in southeastern Cape May County, New Jersey.
Turtle Gut Inlet was an inlet located in what is now Wildwood Crest, in Cape May County, New Jersey, United States.
James Turner was an American silversmith and engraver, active in Boston and Philadelphia.
Kuskusky, also known as the Kuskuskies Towns, Kuskuskie Towns, or Kuskuskies' Indian Town, with a wide variety of other spellings, were several Native American communities inhabited near New Castle, Mahoning, and Edinburg, Pennsylvania, and Youngstown, Ohio, during the mid-18th century. It was not one town, but three or four contiguous towns of the Mingoes, Lenape, and Seneca, located along the Beaver River, at and above the junction of its east and west branches, the Mahoning River and the Shenango River. It is usually referred to in the plural.
Shannopin's Town, or Shannopintown, was an 18th-century Lenape (Delaware) town located within the site of modern-day Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, along the Allegheny River, approximately two miles east from its junction with the Monongahela River. In the early 1700s, British colonial settlers began spreading into western Pennsylvania, forcing Lenape and other American Indian tribes to move further west, settling in the Ohio Country. Shannopin's Town was one of several communities established in western Pennsylvania in the 1720s. The town was largely abandoned during the construction of Fort Duquesne in 1754, although a small community still existed when General John Forbes' troops arrived in September 1758. The community was gone by the time construction on Fort Pitt was started in 1759.
| International | |
|---|---|
| National | |
| Artists | |
| People | |
| Other | |
