Dec 05, 2017 - Sale 2464

Sale 2464 - Lot 26

Price Realized: $ 4,000
?Final Price Realized includes Buyer’s Premium added to Hammer Price
Estimate: $ 700 - $ 1,000
(CALIFORNIA.) Sherman, W.T.; Hammond, R.P.; and Blair, James. Suisun Bay. Large lithographed chart of the bay formed at the confluence of the Sacramento and San Joaquin Rivers. 29x41 inches sheet size, wide margins; light foxing, several closed tears in the margins including a sympathetic repair to the lower right corner. New York: Sarony & Major, 1849

Additional Details

Rare chart circulated by land prospectors promoting a proposed upstart shipping town where the modern East Bay industrial cities of Pittsburg and Antioch lay. General William Tecumseh Sherman recounts his involvement in the creation of the chart: "R.P. Hammond, James Blair, and I made a contract to survey for Colonel J.D. Stevenson his newly-projected city of 'New York of the Pacific', situated at the mouth of a channel through Suisun Bay... We then sounded the bay back and forth, and staked out the best channel up Suisun Bay... We then made the preliminary surveys of the city of 'New York of the Pacific', all of which were duly plotted; and for this work we each received from Stevenson five hundred dollars and ten or fifteen lots. I sold enough lots to make up another five hundred dollars, and let the balance go; for the city of 'New York of the Pacific' never came to anything". (Memoirs of Gen. W.T. Sherman, 1891, pages 101-102). OCLC locates one copy.