Heading: (Rhode Island Manuscript Maps)
Author: McNeill, William Gibbs
Title: First Rhode Island Railroad surveyed by the artist Whistler's uncle
Place Published:
Publisher:
Date Published: 1836
Description:

Original Autograph Manuscript “Map Shewing the Location of the NY P &B Rail-Road through Kent County, R.I., commencing at Hunt’s River, ending at Pawtucket River”. 19 pp. Bound in original marbled stiff wrappers, with leather spine flaked off and front cover detached. 27x44.5 cm. (11x17").

Original manuscript multi-page strip style map executed as Agent and Engineer of the New York, Providence and Boston Rail Road. The first page is an Autograph Document Signed by the Executive Committee of the Railroad, transmitting this report to the State on the “course and bearings” of nine miles of the railroad through the Kent County towns of East Greenwich and Warwick, near Narragansett Bay; next is the title-page and a leaf explaining the simple maps, which showed the route and listed the property owners of the land through which the road would pass. On the verso of the last map is another Autograph Document certifying that the maps were filed with the Kent County Clerk on September 17, 1836.  An historically-significant document of the very first railroad built in Rhode Island – chartered in 1832 to be an essential missing link of a New York-Providence-Boston rail connection. The surveying and engineering work of the following three years was undertaken by two West Point graduates, William Gibbs McNeil, and his close collaborator and brother-in-law – George Washington Whistler, whose second wife, Anna, (McNeil’s sister) would later be immortalized by their son in one of the most famous American paintings of the 19th century. At a time when the railroad mania was sweeping a new Republic that was short of well-trained civil engineers, the US Government loaned pioneering Army Engineers, “scientifically trained” at the Military Academy, to help railroad companies carry out ambitious construction projects. McNeil and Whistler had already worked together on such projects in Ohio and New Jersey before they came to Rhode Island. By that time, Whistler, a widower with three children, had married McNeil’s sister, who would bear him two more sons; he would resign from the Army and go off to build railroads in Czarist Russia, where he would die, leaving behind his widow and children, including 15 year-old James, a youth of artistic bent. McNeil would also leave the Army, building more railroads throughout the United States,  receiving military honors as Major General of the Rhode Island Militia, and dying four years after Whistler – in time to see his nephew James follow in the family footsteps as an Army Engineer before becoming one of the great artists of post-Civil War America. This manuscript, though not bearing the name of Whistler, who had already left the Rhode Island project, is an historical memento of the youthful work of two pioneers of early American railroad engineering and a family association that was significant in American art history.

Some staining and wear, overall very good.