Scull & Heap Map of Philadelphia, 1752

The story of this map

Nicholas Scull was Surveyor General of Pennsylvania and George Heap his collaborator, and in 1752 the two produced this small, handsome map of Philadelphia and the country around it. This restored print is made from the Library of Congress copy, a first state of the first edition, hand coloured and mounted on cloth by some careful eighteenth-century owner.

Two things make it special. Down the sheet runs Penn’s famous grid, the city laid out between the Delaware and the Schuylkill, with the roads and farms of the surrounding townships spreading out beyond. Above it sits an engraved perspective view of the State House, the building where the Declaration of Independence would be signed twenty-four years later. It is one of the earliest published pictures of what we now call Independence Hall, drawn when it was simply the seat of the colony’s assembly.

The sheet is tall and narrow, which makes it easy to place: a landing, the wall beside a door, a narrow stretch of a study. The hand colouring gives it warmth, and the modest size of the original means the middle print formats show it at its best. It belongs to our American Cities collection and sits well beside the Scull map of Pennsylvania from our State Maps collection, made by the same surveyor’s family.

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 and the hand colouring, remove library stamps and scanner artefacts if present, gentle sharpening. The LC copy is mounted on a cloth backing signed in ink by a former owner; any backing visible at the sheet edges will be cropped. The original is small and the scan modest, so the largest formats will show a softer line. 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.