Beaufort North Carolina History: Sauthier Maps of North Carolina's 5 Oldest Towns

Governor William Tryon

Between 1768 and 1771, Claude Joseph Sauthier (1736-1802), a French surveyor and cartographer, was commissioned by royal governor William Tryon to create detailed maps of North Carolina’s chief colonial towns.

Sauthier delineated key buildings or areas-such as churches, courthouses, markets, jails, mills, tanyards (or "tann yards"), flagstaffs, schools, breweries, still houses, and some residences-by an alphabetical letter in descending order of importance, with churches usually listed as A, courthouses as B, jails as C, and so on. Major roads leading to neighboring or important distant towns were carefully marked. Geographic features such as rivers, creeks, mountains or marshes, dams, and canals were usually identified.

Buildings were indicated by small rectangles with heavy outlines on two sides-usually the right angle and the lower side. These two heavy lines have been interpreted as indicating a shadow cast by the bulk of the building, a convention used by Sauthier to illustrate mass. The idealized "formal gardens" behind many town residences also reveal this convention, suggesting a mass of green foliage rising above the surrounding paths. The homes shown on the maps were all built near the street and were typically rectangular in shape, with fields or gardens located adjacent or behind the structures. The X inscribed within the perimeter of a structure has been interpreted to mean that it was a single-story building. On the originals some buildings were shown in color highlight (red), which may indicate dwellings. (NCpedia (by Linda F. Carnes-McNaughton 2006)

Below are Sauthier Maps of NC's 5 oldest Towns

Bath (1705), New Bern (1710), Edenton (1712), Beaufort (1713) and Wilmington (1740)

The Sauthier maps were created between 1768 and 1770.