Did Vermont connect with Lake Erie??

 


Whoever heard of West Vermont State - extending all the way to Lake Erie?   A huge Vermont, divided into 3 sections, appears on an old manuscript map in the British Public Records Office. "Middle Verdmont" on the old map went from the Green Mountains to Lake Champlain. "West Verdmont" went fron Lake Champlain to Lake Erie.     Residents of Rochester and Syracuse may be surprised to learn that they might have been part of Vermont.


 The heavy band "Verdmont State or everlasting Hills"  depicts the Green Mountains. "East Verdmont" is shown with lots of settlements along the Connecticut River. 
The "270,000 souls" could be a population count for the entire area of Verdmont.
(By the way "Verd" was archaic French for Green.) 
The map needs more study to nail down the year it was drawn but it  may be ca 1780 as it refers to the United States of America.
I have annotated my scan with bold type and the yellow shading to make it easier to explain here.


My "original" scan of the whole map is next below with my scribbles affixed.  Note that the map extends from Connecticut to North Carolina and north to Montreal .  A note on the original scan states ".... the Everlasting Hill would have been the boundary between Canadas, Verdmont & Kentucky on the NW and the United States of America on the SE...."  (see actual note below)

The note needs some study and research as does the whole map... The Dr. Franklin is probably Ben Franklin. Silas Deane was an important Revolutionary War figure ...  Why was this map made and what is going on here?

I made this blog post  hoping someone else might dig further.

 My image is of a reduced size xerox of a map I copied from Vermont Historical Society's Matt Jones papers in 2003. Jones wrote a book in 1939.  The "PRO" in the reversed text refers to the Public Record Office in London, from which Jones acquired the photostat I copied.
It would be interesting to see if one could get a color scan from the PRO today....

Dave Allen  Dec 2025.

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