John Randel Jr.
John Randel Jr. was an American surveyor, cartographer, civil engineer, and inventor from Albany, New York who completed a full survey of Manhattan Island from 1808 to 1817, in service of the creation of the Commissioners' Plan of 1811, which determined that New York City - which consisted at the time of only Manhattan - would in the future be laid out in a rectilinear grid of streets.
Randel is also noted for having received one of the largest awards at the time as a result of his breach of contract lawsuit against the Chesapeake & Delaware Canal Company. The company's appeals of the judgment went to the United States Supreme Court, which affirmed the award, as well as Randel's right to directly receive canal tolls in order to collect it.
Early life
Randel was born in Albany, New York on December 3, 1787 to a large and close family; he was one of the middle children. His father, John Sr., was a second generation Scotch-Irish American who was a jeweler and brass founder, while his mother Catherine was born in New Jersey to a land-rich family. John Sr. served in the American Revolutionary War as a private, and married Catherine in 1780, a year after he was released from his regiment for the injuries he had sustained.John Jr.'s formal education encompassed only primary school, where he learned to respect the ideas and ideals of the Enlightenment. As a young man, Randel would be deeply committed to reason, but was also a religious man, disagreeing, for instance with Thomas Paine's views about religion expressed in The Age of Reason. Raised in a very tight-knit Presbyterian community, Randel attended church regularly, and strictly held the Sabbath as a day of rest; one of his workers later complained that they were unable to keep up with their correspondence because Randel would not let him write letters on Sundays. While working in Manhattan, Randel sometimes crossed the Hudson River by ferry to attend the First Presbyterian Church in Orange, New Jersey, where relatives of his mother were elders. It was on these visits that he met the woman who became his first wife, his cousin, Matilda Harrison, whom he married in 1813.
After his formal education ended, Randel was apprenticed, possibly as early as age 12 although more likely at 16, to Simeon De Witt, who was the Surveyor General of New York State. De Witt was familiar with Randel, as both families were from Albany, a city of only 7,500 at the time, and Randel's father had served with De Witt's brother in the American Revolution. It was a time in American history when many young men went into surveying, at least for a short time, as there was a great need for them as the empty places - empty of whites, anyway - began to become settled.
When Randel finished his apprenticeship and became an assistant surveyor, he interpreted the field reports of other surveyors to draft maps based on them of land in the Adirondack Mountains and on the Oneida Reservation, mapped the Albany Turnpike between Albany and Schenectady and the Great Western Turnpike from Albany to Cooperstown, and surveyed property lots in Albany and in Central New York, particularly Oneida County
Mapping Manhattan
Despite his meager experience, through a recommendation by De Witt, one of three commissioners charged with developing a plan for the future layout of New York City's streets, and approval by Gouverneur Morris, one of the other commissioners and the unofficial president of the commission, Randel, at age 20, was hired to replace the commission's original chief surveyor, Charles Frederick Loss, who had proved to be incompetent.Marguerite Holloway, Randel's biographer, divides his work in New York into three periods. The first, from 1808 to 1810, resulted in the 1811 publication of the Commissioners' Plan. Phase two ran from 1811 to 1817, during which he completed the necessary geodetic surveying and inscribed the grid into the land. The final phase was from around 1818 to 1821, when Randel and his first wife Matilda became high quality cartographers, makers of maps.
Randel began work in June 1808, and was ordered to conduct a detailed survey of Manhattan island to help produce the plan of New York City's future streets. The final map, the Commissioners' Plan of 1811, laid out the streets of New York from 14th Street to 155th Street into a rectangular grid, without accommodating the island's terrain.
After the publication of the Commissioners' Plan, at the instigation of the commission, Randel was retained by the Common Council of New York for the next 6 years continue the surveying necessary to lay down actual streets, as the Commissioners' Plan was more notional than practical.
To do this work, Randel was given an allocation of $1,000 for surveying instruments, but he also spent his own money - between $2,400 and $3,000 - developing seven surveying instruments which, among other benefits, would not vary in size because of temperature changes, resulting in great precision. An expert in Colonial era surveying equipment has expressed the opinion, after closely examining images of Randel's new instruments - the pamphlet that explained them has been lost - that Randel was "Basically... a mechanical genius." Commissioner Simeon De Witt said of Randel's work that it was made "with an accuracy not exceeded by any work of the kind in America."
To inscribe the grid onto the land, Randel and his staff erected almost 1,600 markers - primarily long, square marble monuments inscribed with the number of the street, placed at each intersection. Where rocks prevented the use of the marble markers, they blasted holes with gunpowder, poured in lead, and anchored long, square iron bolts. In all, they positioned 1,549 marble markers and 98 iron bolts to define the pattern of the grid.
As part of the third stage of his work, Randel created an extremely large map of the city, at an unprecedented scale. This was done by way of ninety-two by colored "Farm Maps" made at a scale of that overlaid Manhattan's natural topography with the intended grid. When put together, the Farm Maps made a map of the city about long. It took Randel and his wife Matilda two years, from 1819 to 1820, to finish the maps, working from their new home, having moved to Orange, New Jersey. He needed, asked for, and received an extension from the Common Council to complete the task, and even then he did not quite make the deadline, delivering the last maps in September 1820, about four months late.
Randel's Farm Maps are praised for their accuracy and usefulness. Historian Isaac Newton Phelps Stokes, in his The Iconography of Manhattan Island, 1498-1909 called them "the most complete and valuable topographical record of the period that exists. It is, in fact, the only early topographical record of the island."
As well as the Farm Maps, Randel also produced an atlas of the city, filling in with "astounding precision" the details of street locations and elevations which had been left off the official map.
The map controversy
There was a controversy about the publication of the map of the Commissioners' Plan. Randel had begun to prepare a map to go to the engraver, using his original papers, when he found out that the council had given William Bridges, one of the handful of city-recognized surveyors, the right to do so. Bridges simply copied one of Randel's previously published maps, which were in the public domain, introducing errors as he did so. Bridges published and copyrighted the resulting map as a private venture, leaving Randel out in the cold.The conflict between the two men did not come to a head until three years later, in 1814, when Randel starting advertising his own version of the Commissioners' Plan map, which he said was "more correct" then the previously published one - he did not mention Bridges by name - not only because of the errors he claimed had crept into the map when Bridges copied it, but because he, Randel, "has since completed the measurements and fixed monuments by contract with the , he alone is possessed of all the materials for this valuable work." He published a letter from Gouverneur Morris, who called Randel's map "an excellent work... indispensable to those who wish to make themselves acquainted with the Topography of that interesting space which is comprizes . It appears to me more accurate than anything of the kind which has yet appeared.... I consider it highly deserving of public patronage." Bridges shot back, commenting that Randel was "unprincipled" and "conceited", and lacking in "honorable conduct". Randel responded, listing many, but not all, of the errors in Bridges' map, including islands that were not the right length or width or were in the wrong place, rocks and hills misplaced and mis-sized, rivers and forts too close to each other, missing and misplaced buildings, and streets shown as closed that were not. Bridges, whose reputation both as a surveyor and as a man was far from clean, did not reply, perhaps because his wife was sick at the time, and died several months after Randel's second letter. In any case, Bridges himself died shortly after that, and Randel did not publish his map or had it engraved, due to national security concerns connected with the War of 1812. He eventually published it in 1821. Randel's future litigious behavior may have been founded on his being wronged in not receiving what he felt was the proper credit for his work on the Manhattan map.
When Randel returned to the New York City map project, he had a new idea about it: the map of the city would be integrated into a map of the Northeastern United States. In need of money - the Panic of 1819 was in effect, and the only work given to Randel by New York City was a survey of the Brooklyn Navy Yard - Randel hoped that the unusual new map would bring in some cash. He cleared the project with his mentor, Simeon De Witt, whose map of New York state was highly praised, and engaged noted engraver Peter Maverick. When it was published in 1821, it included a large-scale map of Philadelphia that scrolled over Brooklyn and Queens, while the map of Manhattan scrolled over the map of the states of Connecticut, Rhode Island and part of Massachusetts. New York state directly north of the city was also shown up to the longitude of Connecticut's northern border. While beautiful and innovative, and praised at the time for its accuracy and arrangement, the map was not a financial success, nor was the Common Council satisfied at the small scale at which Manhattan was shown. They bought 24 copies of the map, and then engaged another mapmaker for a larger scale map which could be more easily utilized. Randel wrote to the mayor that he would attempt to make a map of twice the size, but never did. In fact, the map was the only engraved map he was to make in his lifetime: his earlier maps of the Commissioner's Plan and his Farm Maps were done by hand. Only a single copy of the map remains, in the Library of Congress.