Surveying Northeastern Pennsylvania: Contextualizing the Flower-Walker Collection at the Tioga Point Museum

Abstract

Local museums and historical societies often hold rare and unique cartographic resources that compliment larger map collections. A prime example of this is the Flower-Walker Collection at the Tioga Point Museum in Athens Pennsylvania. The museum holds a collection of over 800 hand-drawn, manuscript maps that depict in detail the development of Pennsylvania’s upper Susquehanna Valley from 1790 to 1940, a formative time period of land speculation and development in the United States’ history. The Flower-Walker collection is unique in that all maps in the collection come from a single family of surveyors who played a central role in documenting the settlement of the land. The Flower-Walker family’s rich tradition of surveying and commitment to preserving regional history, make this cartographic collection an exquisite case study of land speculation and development during the middle of the eighteenth to nineteenth centuries of U.S. history.