A very scarce, localized effort to catalog and preserve the geographical history of the colonial and frontier Midwest before it was entirely erased by late 19th-century industrialization and agricultural development.
Written by Charles R. Brown, a Michigan legal reporter and historian, and published by a regional press in Kalamazoo, the work documents 94 specific geographic sites, tracking the exact locations of early French Jesuit missions, British military outposts, and fur-trading posts scattered across Ohio, Indiana, Illinois, Michigan, and Wisconsin. It also includes a detailed, fold-out historical and chronological map.
Because many of the earthworks, log stockades, and frontier ruins Brown documented were rapidly crumbling into dust or being plowed under by 1870s expansion, this publication serves as an important preservation effort, bridging early colonial records, such as the Jesuit Relations and French trading accounts, to the physical landscape of the post-Civil War era and in advance of complete industrialization.
Brown, Charles R. The Old Northwest Territory: Its Missions, Forts, and Trading Posts. Kalamazoo. Kalamazoo Publishing Company. 1875. 32pp + map.
Good condition, bound with original wraps in a larger buckram binding for library usage with all leaves after the pamphlet being blank sheets. Map in a very good state.
