Online Talk about Henry Pelham and His Map, 15 Jan.

On Wednesday, 15 January, the National Parks of Boston, in partnership with the Boston Public Library, will present a virtual lecture on the topic “Mapping a City Under Siege: Henry Pelham.”

The event description says:

In 1775, Henry Pelham, aspiring artist and half-brother of the famed John Singleton Copley, found himself inside a city under siege. A loyalist with ample time and nowhere to go, Pelham gained permission from the British military to map the war developing around him. Though many other engineers mapped Boston in 1775 and 1776, Pelham’s artistic eye and intimate loyalist connections resulted in something unparalleled in how it depicts the landscape of the first chapter of a civil war. Today, his work is immensely valuable in helping us understand and reconstruct a Boston under siege 250 years ago.

The N.P.S. ethos apparently precludes naming who on the interpretive staff will speak about this map, but of course the agency has high standards for accuracy.

This Zoom program begins at 6:00 P.M. Anyone who registers can tune in for free.

For more on places that appear Henry Pelham’s map of Boston, and how they appear today, check out the sunny video I made with Lee Wright of The History List.

To tie this event together with my talk at Gore Place on Sunday, in the summer of 1788 the painter and paint merchant Samuel Gore was advertising:

A few elegant Plans of Boston, and its environs, including Milton, Dorchester, Roxbury, Brookline, Cambridge, Medford, Charlestown, parts of Malden and Chelsea, with the military works constructed in those places, in the years 1775 and 76, by Mr. H. PELHAM.

That was shortly after Samuel’s father John Gore had returned from Loyalist exile, probably bringing the first copies of Pelham’s siege map to be sold in Boston. The Gore and Copley/Pelham families had done business before the war, and they did business after the war, too.