Thomas Jefferys

Thomas Jefferys (c.1719–1771), "Geographer to King George III", was an English cartographer who was the leading map supplier of his day.Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, 2004.] He engraved and printed maps for government and other official bodies and produced a wide range of commercial maps and atlases, especially of North America."Buckinghamshire in the 1760s and 1820s: the county maps of Jefferys and Bryant", Buckinghamshire Archaeological Society, 2000, ISBN 0-949003-17-4. Information for this article has been taken from the introduction by Paul Laxton.]

Early work

As "Geographer to the Prince of Wales", he produced "A Plan of all the Houses, destroyed & damaged by the Great Fire, which begun in Exchange Alley Cornhill, on Friday March 25, 1748". [Peter Barber, "The map book", Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 2005, ISBN 0-297-84372-9, pp. 204-205.] He produced "The Small English Atlas" with Thomas Kitchin, and he engraved plans of towns in the English Midlands.

Maps of North America

In 1754, Jefferys published a map of Virginia which had been surveyed by Joshua Fry and Peter Jefferson in 1751. The next year he published a "Map of the Most Inhabited Part of New England" surveyed by John Green, and in 1768 he published "A General Topography of North America and the West Indies" in association with Robert Sayer. In 1775, after his death, collections of his maps were published by Sayer as "The American Atlas" and "The West-India Atlas". [ [http://www.usm.maine.edu/~maps/percy/jefferys.html Thomas Jefferys and the Mapping of North America] ] [ [http://geoimages.berkeley.edu/JefferysAtlas/Jefferys_TOC.html Thomas Jefferys' West-India Atlas of 1775] ]

Maps of English counties

Jefferys commissioned surveys and published maps of several English counties. These were large-scale maps with several sheets for each county; in the case of Bedfordshire and Huntingdonshire the scale was two inches to one mile (1:31680).

*Bedfordshire, surveyed 1765, published 1765, reprinted 1983 [Thomas Jefferys, "The County of Bedford", reprinted by Bedfordshire Historical Record Society, 1983. Introduction by Betty Chambers.]
*Huntingdonshire, surveyed 1766, published 1768
*Oxfordshire, surveyed 1766-67, published (by Andrew Dury) 1767
*County Durham, published 1768
*Buckinghamshire, surveyed 1766-68, published 1770, reprinted 2000
*Westmoreland, surveyed 1768, published 1770
*Yorkshire, surveyed 1767-70, published 1771-72
*Cumberland, surveyed 1770-71, published 1774
*Northamptonshire, survey (originally by Thomas Eyre) revised 1771, published 1779

After the death of Jefferys, these maps were re-issued by other map publishers such as William Faden.

References