Beyond Borders - Mapping Maine and the Northeast Boundary

How the long-fixed line of 1842 was created can be examined in extraordinary detail with the material in the Maine Historical Society’s Thomas Barclay Collection that contains documents, land surveys, and maps dating from 1764 to 1893. The collection was mostly gathered by British commissioner Thomas Barclay (1753-1830), loyalist of New York and Nova Scotia, and British agent Ward Chipman (1754-1824), loyalist of Massachusetts and New Brunswick. Both men served on multiple border commissions, and their impact was extended since each was assisted (and followed) by a son in similar official capacities. Other key figures with prominent surviving papers in the collection include British commissioner John Ogilvy (1769-1819) of Scotland and Upper Canada, US commissioner James Sullivan (1744-1808) of Massachusetts and Maine, loyalist Robert Pagan (1750-1820) of Glasgow, Maine, and New Brunswick, and numerous surveyors who undertook arduous work in interior lands that remained relatively unknown to Euro-Americans even into the twentieth century. The fur trader and map maker David Thompson (1770-1857), famous today for his trans-continental journeys and voyage down the Columbia River to the Pacific in 1811, has correspondence and maps in the Barclay Collection from the early 1820s.

A critical challenge to create the border arose from how to translate the confident but imaginary projections made by distant imperial authorities to accord with the actual landscape of the northeast as understood by the people who lived there. Erroneous geographic claims that confounded establishing the border date from as early as the royal charter for Nova Scotia of 1621, long disagreements about the boundaries of French Acadie, and where to draw the line between colonial Massachusetts and Nova Scotia. Some of the earliest documents from 1764 pertain to areas at the eastern end of the border (a survey of Passamaquoddy Bay by John Mitchell) and in the west (treaties with the Chenussio and Seneca, both Haudenosaunee, or Iroquois, tribes) negotiated with Indian Superintendent William Johnson at Johnson Hall in New York and even further west at Fort Niagara.

The fundamental treaty that made fixing the international border such a long and difficult process, however, was the Treaty of Paris that ended the American Revolution in 1783. It made multiple ambiguous geographic assertions, especially about the placement of the boundary separating the yet-to-be-created province of New Brunswick and the future state of Maine. The large terrain involved in determining the northeastern border stretched from islands in Passamaquoddy Bay in the east, to identifying the actual St. Croix River (as well as its source), and deciding how to follow the long St. John (Wolostoq) River and its tributaries, which was made especially vexing by reference to a supposedly definitive “highlands” that separated watershed drainages between the Atlantic and the St. Lawrence River. (See, for example, the map of the “imaginary” highlands produced by the British in 1840, below)