BodyText1
Along with boaters, parasols, and comfortable traveling clothes, 19th-century sightseers traveling by steamer on the 150-mile stretch of the Hudson River between New York City and Albany often carried a guidebook containing an accordion-style, fold-out map. The map helped interested travelers identify streams, islands, heights, prominent residences, architecturally interesting landmarks, and native place names along the way.
One such map, titled Hudson by daylight: map, showing the prominent residences, historic landmarks, old reaches of the Hudson, Indian names, &c, is now part of the Winterthur collection. The hand-painted, 8'6"-by-4" map was published in 1878 by the New York & Albany Day Line Streamers company on machine-made, wove paper. The map’s outline was created via a lithographic process using black printer’s ink; features such as land and water were hand-colored with green, blue, purple, pink, and yellow watercolors.
Although the map is still colorful, WUDPAC Fellow Verónica Ivette Mercado Oliveras treated it recently because condition issues made it unsafe to handle. Verónica, a library and archives major with a paper minor, found the most serious problems were caused by two types of pressure-sensitive tape applied in previous restoration campaigns to mend breaks between some of its 24 accordion-style sections. In some places the tape, now yellowed and deteriorating, had been applied on both sides of the paper. This created a thickness that made the map difficult to fold.