Map of the Month - December 2012

This month's featured map is a reproduction of Hooker's Map of the Village of Brooklyn in the Year 1827. The reproduction was made in 1861 for Brooklyn reporter Henry McCloskey's Manual of the Corporation. Hooker's map is one of the earliest detailed maps of Brooklyn, showing wards, churches, the Brooklyn Navy Yard, the marshlands of Gowanus, and even Andre Parmentier's Garden, one of Brooklyn's earliest botanical gardens.

Hooker's map of the village of Brooklyn in the year 1827. William Hooker. 1861. Brooklyn Historical Society Map Collection.

1827, the year that the Hooker Map was originally published, was an auspicious year for Brooklynites. On July 4th of that year, New York State abolished slavery.  Over the next decades, Kings County, an agricultural region once reliant on slave labor, would become the home of a thriving and diverse abolitionist movement.  Along with Weeksville Heritage Center and Irondale Ensemble Project, BHS is chronicling the history of Brooklyn's abolitionist movement through the In Pursuit of Freedom Project.

Click here to view detail from the map.

Interested in seeing more maps? You can view the BHS map collection anytime during the library's open hours, Wed.-Fri., from 1-5 p.m. No appointment is necessary to view most maps. Our cataloged maps can be searched through BobCat and our map inventories through Emma.

Map of the Month is part of a project to catalog our map holdings, funded through the Council on Library and Information Resources Hidden Collections program. If you would like to help us do more of this kind of work with our exciting map holdings, donate here.