For a map, this one is oddly disorienting. The first issue is that although the 250-year-old document charts areas of New England and New York, the name Canada appears at the bottom. The mapmaker has, rather unconventionally, chosen to orient north to the map’s bottom left corner. Even after the viewer mentally turns the map, however, it still looks strange to modern eyes. Many of the town names are unfamiliar and large sections of the territory bear no names at all, as if they have never been surveyed.
But to people who saw this map when it was first published in 1778, the most striking part might have been the words near its center: “State of Vermont.” By literally putting Vermont on the map for the first time, the mapmaker was making a political statement, a defiant declaration of Vermonters’ right to self-determination. This was, after all, just a year after a disputed section of New England had declared itself the independent state of Vermont.
The region had long been contested by Native tribes and the French. Once the British took control of the area, the colonies of New Hampshire and New York battled in court over which colony could grant land in what is today Vermont. The struggle continued even after revolution was declared.
The maker of the map was taking sides in that fight. A note in the map’s corner calls New York’s grants “spurious” and says they were often issued to “favourites of these Princes of Land Jobbers,” i.e. these were fake titles issued to friends of speculators. In contrast, the note says the newly minted Vermonters held their New Hampshire charters “by the triple title of honest purchase(,) of Industry in Settling; and now lately that of Conquest.”
The map is unsigned but is attributed to Bernard Romans, a Dutch-born mapmaker who sailed to North America in the 1750s and eventually came to embrace the American cause. While serving under Benedict Arnold during the capture of Fort Ticonderoga in 1775, Romans met members of the Green Mountain Boys and became an ardent supporter of Vermont independence.
Of all the documents ever published about Vermont, this is sort of a holy grail for collectors. And it’s nearly as rare. Four original copies are known to exist in the collections of national libraries and educational institutions. A few more might be in private hands. Perhaps others lurk, forgotten, in somebody’s attic.
Vermont historian Kevin Graffagnino dreams of someday finding three previously undiscovered copies of the original Romans map. He’d donate one to the University of Vermont library, where he was the longtime curator of Vermont history and later director of Special Collections, and one to the Vermont Historical Society, where he served as executive director. He’d keep the third copy. A person is allowed to dream.
Graffagnino has spent much of his career immersed in the field of Vermontiana, which involves material items associated with the culture and history of the state. Vermontiana has a broad definition. It can include anything from clothing to pottery to paintings to furniture to farm implements — really anything that helps tell the story of Vermont. But as a self-described “book guy,” Graffagnino has focused on words — letters, maps, books, that sort of thing.
Graffagnino has always been passionate about Vermontiana. As a young man, he even ran an antique books business. Now, a half century later, he is sharing his knowledge and opinions to help others form their own collections.
In conjunction with UVM’s Silver Special Collections Library and Center for Research on Vermont, Graffagnino has just published “Vermontiana: An Annotated Checklist, 1764-1899.” In it, he details what he considers the 154 most important pieces of 18th and 19th century Vermontiana to collect. All the items are printed works — books, pamphlets, broadsides, maps, art prints and even a globe. There are no handwritten items since by definition these articles are unique and so cannot be in more than one collection.
Graffagnino started collecting antique books while still a teenager. “Are book people born or made? Is it nature or nurture?” he asked. “For me, it was nature. I don’t remember when I didn’t love old books. Coolness to me was: ‘Look at that! It’s 150 years old!’ And I know it’s just an old newspaper. It might be worth a dollar, but to me, it was cool.”
Collecting is a combination of the intellectual and the emotional. “There’s nothing logical about collecting,” he said. A copy of an old document will have the same information as the original, but to collectors there is something special about the real thing.
“The collecting instinct and madness are inexplicable to people who don’t feel it,” Graffagnino said.
When he entered the field, Graffagnino said “there were elders, but there were also people in their 20s who were collecting and I don’t see that anymore.” When a great Vermontiana collection was auctioned this fall in Burlington, he saw one younger person there, a junior at Bennington College.
“I need to see more people in their 20s and 30s pick up the torch, as I picked it up,” he said.
Graffagnino was guided in his early years by generous collectors of Vermontiana, including Gertrude Mallary and Gertrude Lepine, who encouraged his interest. He wants to repay the two Gertrudes and others who helped him by mentoring a younger generation.
Graffagnino’s antique book business, which he launched at the tender age of 17, helped pay for his undergraduate degree at the University of Vermont, which he noted cost about $550 a semester when he attended in the 1970s. After graduating, he worked for nearly two decades for the university’s library and Special Collections.
Graffagnino’s best days were spent tracking down overlooked gems. In an interview, he grew animated describing a visit to the Victorian mansion in Island Pond that had been the home of the late Porter Dale, who represented Vermont in Congress in the 1920s and ’30s.
A grandson of Dale said he had found only a small stack of the senator’s papers, but Graffagnino was confident the house must hold more. So he searched. At one point, Graffagnino entered a large library room and became curious about its odd proportions. Noticing handles on the bookcases by the fireplace, he pulled. Behind the bookcase was the senator’s home office, which the family had forgotten about, and it was full of Dale’s papers. The family ended up donating a van full of documents to the university.
From experiences like this, Graffagnino learned to “look in every closet, look in every drawer, search from the basement to the attic.”
At another old Victorian home, this one in Bristol, Graffagnino was leafing through an early 19th century compendium of Vermont laws when he noticed a piece of paper stuck between the pages. It was a British prisoner of war’s hand-drawn map of British installations along Lake Champlain during the War of 1812. It turned out that an ancestor of the home’s owner had been an officer in the Vermont militia and had gotten the prisoner of war to draw the map.
“This Lt. Peake, who probably died in about 1840, stuck it in the law book,” Graffagnino said. “And I was probably the first guy to see it in 130 years.”
Graffagnino said he made these finds for the University of Vermont, not himself.
“I never had any money, and I always wanted to stay away from conflict of interest,” he said.
Most collections, however, aren’t built this way. They are assembled by networking — talking with antique bookstore owners, rare document dealers and other collectors — and by keeping an eye on auction websites.
Graffagnino said he intends his Vermontiana book to serve as a primer for collectors in terms of what to collect and hopes it will bring more people into the field. He estimated that leading collectors would agree with perhaps 120 of his choices, but that the remainder are subjective.
In some cases, they are representative examples of a type of document, such as town maps and bird’s eye views; materials focusing on the stone industries, railroads, or canals; or about social movements, including anti-slavery, temperance and women’s suffrage.
Each entry provides helpful details about the item, some suggested reading to learn more about the topic and a rating system of how rare it is.
An item’s rarity indicates how long it might take to track down a copy. In extreme examples, like Romans’ map, a 1778 version of the map is extremely unlikely to be sold, and if it were, it could cost as much as $100,000. (The 1780 reprinted version is less rare but would still cost upward of $35,000.)
The good news for collectors is that many examples in “Vermontiana” can easily be found, such as a copy of Zadock Thompson’s 1842 “History of Vermont, Natural, Civil, and Statistical,” Abby Hemenway’s 1858 “Poets and Poetry of Vermont” or Daniel Friedrich Sotzmann’s 1796 map of Vermont. Though a piece being readily available doesn’t always mean it will be affordable, some of the items can be purchased for about $50.
Graffagnino also includes an appendix listing more than 200 books from the 20th century that he believes are significant or interesting, most of which can be bought for $20 to $50 each.
Graffagnino sees many ways for people to form Vermontiana collections. They can try to see how many of the items on his list they can collect — no one, not even a major collecting institution, has them all. A collection containing 75 of these items would be impressive, he said, one with 100 would be remarkable, and one with 125 of them would be among the finest ever assembled.
But other collectors might prefer to specialize by seeking out, say, memoirs of prominent Vermonters, pamphlets on women’s rights, county atlases or materials about the 19th century sheep farming craze.
“I think most people are going to find their niche,” he said.
Whatever direction people decide to take their collections, Graffagnino has provided a map to help guide them.
“Vermontiana: An Annotated Checklist, 1764-1899,” is available from the Vermont Historical Society in Montpelier, The Eloquent Page bookstore in St. Albans, and Phoenix Books in Rutland, Essex and Burlington, or by emailing Kevin Graffagnino at jkgraff@umich.edu.
