Bird's-Eye View of Charleston, 1872

The story of this map

Seven years after the Civil War ended, Charleston commissioned a portrait of itself getting back on its feet. C. N. Drie’s 1872 bird’s-eye view is that portrait, and this restored print is made from the coloured lithograph in the Library of Congress.

The view is taken from high over the harbour, so the peninsula lies before you with the Ashley River on one side and the Cooper on the other. Streets run in their grid, church steeples rise above the roofs, and the wharves are lined with ships. What sets this sheet apart is its border: Drie surrounded the city with small illustrated vignettes of its notable buildings, and a numbered index below lets you match them to their places in the view. It is a map, a picture and a guidebook on one sheet.

Charleston people are fiercely attached to their city, and this is the print that lets them show it. It suits a hall, a study or a kitchen in a house south of Broad, and the soft palette of greys, greens and water blues works with pale walls and old furniture alike. It belongs to our American Cities collection and pairs well with the 1790 Petrie plan, which shows the same peninsula eighty years earlier, or with the Charleston Harbor nautical chart.

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.