“Georgia from the Latest Authorities.” W. Barker, sculp. Engraved for Mathew Carey’s American edition of Guthrie’s Geography, 1795.

“Georgia from the Latest Authorities.” W. Barker, sculp. Engraved for Mathew Carey’s American edition of Guthrie’s Geography, 1795.

Mathew Carey, an Irish immigrant, became the nation’s first large-scale cartographic publisher of American maps and atlases. He sought to make money and to celebrate the new republic. This particular atlas and Joseph Scott’s Gazetteer of 1795 share honors as the first American atlas. Carey included 21 maps on American subjects. Unlike Scott, Carey identified Georgia’s counties including a Tallassee County on the southern border that never existed as an official entity, only as an Indian name.

1795