A New American Globe

By Amanda Kay Gustin

The Vermont Historical Society’s newest exhibition, “A New American Globe: James Wilson of Vermont” brings out long-hidden objects from our collections and re-examines the story of a Vermont icon. Director of Collections & Access Amanda Kay Gustin and Collections Manager Teresa Greene first began to look more closely at James Wilson nearly two years ago, when some unresolved questions in the cataloging record for a Wilson globe in VHS’s collections prompted a closer look. Attempting to answer those questions led to a complete re-examination of Wilson’s life and work that has included hundreds of miles of travel, cutting-edge technological analysis, and a re-conceptualizing of intellectual life in early Vermont.

James Wilson first moved to Bradford around 1796, and though he had some training as a blacksmith, he worked primarily as a farmer. As the story goes, around the time he moved to Vermont, he became obsessed with globes after visiting Dartmouth College and viewing a collection of imported globes from Britain. Nearly fifteen years later, in 1810, Wilson produced and sold the first edition of his “new American globe,” and in so doing became the first American to make globes for sale.

Ultimately, Wilson would produce his globes in Bradford from 1810 to 1817, before moving his company, now J. Wilson & Sons, to Albany, New York. In 1833, he sold the business to Cyrus Lancaster, who had worked alongside him for years. The company continued to produce globes for another twenty years.

Wilson’s goals were multifaceted; he had a lively scientific mind and appreciated the challenge of making the globe, and he had an interest in building a business, though ultimately he entrusted his sons to run it. He also argued to Congress that American-made globes were the superior tool for American classrooms, riding a wave of nationalist sentiment in the early American republic that also saw Webster’s Compendious Dictionary of the English Language and Emma Willard’s History of the United States. 

By the mid-1820s, J. Wilson and Sons was producing hundreds of globes at a time: they were available for sale in local stores up and down the Eastern seaboard, and were also finding their way into educational curricula in New York and Pennsylvania schools. Intellectually, the study of American-produced geography helped to fix and define the idea of America’s role in the world, and helped to underpin the Monroe Doctrine, justify the nation’s expansion into the west, and ultimately its imperial ambitions during the second half of the 19th century.

Wilson and his work had a major impact in the character of the country, but the story of Wilson — his origins and influences — has remained murky. Plenty of stories swirl around Wilson and hard facts are scarce. Even within his own lifetime, he moved from history to myth – everyone wanted to tell his story, but few people bothered to check facts before they wrote.

To set the story straight, VHS embarked on an ambitious goal: uncover the actual story of James Wilson, and get a fuller understanding of how he went about producing the first commercially-available globes in the country. To do this, we traveled across New England and corresponded with institutions and scholars around the world. Some of those resources include primary sources that are held by Silver Special Collections at the University of Vermont, which showed that Wilson engraved his own maps and even developed his own ink recipe. Many of Wilson’s original globes still exist: we visited as many of them as we could, and we still aren’t done. 

In May 2022, VHS, the Shelburne Museum, Silver Special Collections at the University of Vermont, and the Sullivan Museum at Norwich University brought their Wilson globes to the Central Vermont Medical Center to be x-rayed, which helped greatly advance our knowledge of their construction. We were able to confirm some of our suspicions about globe construction – in particular, that Wilson’s use of internal counterweights to ensure smooth rotations was experimental and changed frequently. We were also able to gather hard data to help us graph minute details like the thickness of the plaster and papier-mâché layers, the shape and size of nails and other metal fixtures, and more.

The exhibition in the National Life Gallery features three of Wilson’s globes: the extremely rare first globe from 1810, as well as a matched terrestrial and celestial set of globes from 1831 that descended through Wilson’s family. The exhibit also features an orrery, or physical model of the solar system, that Wilson made toward the end of his life, on loan from the University of Vermont. The exhibit goes beyond showcasing Wilson’s creations: the Calder Gallery features a series of interactive activities designed to provoke questions about the use of maps to understand history, questioning the practice of cartography, the evolution of place names, and the way maps present (or obscure) information. Later this fall, VHS staff, with the support of interns from the Geography Department at the University of Vermont, will also produce the first scholarly article on Wilson in nearly 75 years and will develop a six-episode podcast focusing on topics in Vermont history as seen through six historic maps.

“A New American Globe” was on display at the Vermont History Museum from July 2022 to June 2023.

This article originally appeared in the Summer 2022 issue of our member magazine, History Connections. To get it and support the Vermont Historical Society, sign up as a member.