Petrie Plan of Charleston, 1790

The story of this map

Charleston in 1788 was the richest city in the American South and a place where fire was the great fear. Edmund Petrie surveyed the town that August at the request of Adam Tunno for the Phoenix Fire-Company of London, a fire-insurance office that wanted to know exactly what it was underwriting. The plan was published in 1790, and this restored print is made from the Library of Congress copy.

It is a beautifully plain map. The peninsula is drawn with north toward the lower right, so the waterfront and its long row of wharves run across the sheet and the streets sit in their familiar grid behind them. Every street is named and indexed, and a keyed list picks out churches, markets and public buildings. The engraved lettering is crisp and the whole thing has the quiet confidence of a document made for people who needed it to be right.

For a Charleston home this is the foundation piece: the same streets, the same wharves, the town you walk through today at the moment it was drawn. It suits a hallway, a study or a dining room in a house that has seen a few centuries itself. It belongs to our American Cities collection and pairs naturally with the 1872 bird’s-eye view of Charleston, or with the Charleston Harbor chart from our Nautical Charts collection.

Printed to order on archival matte paper and framed in the country of delivery.

Before and after

Left: the archive scan exactly as published. Right: the file that goes to the printer.

Archive scanRestored

Restoration notes

Restoration plan: crop scan margins, balance colour cast and levels while keeping the paper tone, remove library stamps and scanner artefacts if present, gentle sharpening. No repainting of original content.

Every print carries its archive credit on the packing slip. Paper tone and small imperfections of the original are kept on purpose; nothing is redrawn.