A New Map of the Western Parts of Virginia, Pennsylvania, Maryland, and North Carolina…

This map, published in London in 1778 by New Jersey-born military engineer Thomas Hutchins, shows what was then the western territory claimed by Virginia, Pennsylvania, Maryland, and North Carolina. Hutchins surveyed the land west of the Allegheny Mountains and around the Ohio and Mississippi rivers during his service as an engineer in the Seven Years' War and then on subsequent surveying trips between 1764 and 1775. Virginia claimed what is now Kentucky and much of West Virginia, territory which had been ceded by the Haudenosaunee (Six Nations Iroquois Confederacy) in the 1768 Treaty of Fort Stanwix.

Hutchins also identified the region labeled “Indiana,” southeast of the Ohio River between the southern border of Pennsylvania and the Little Kanawha Creek, granted to merchants Samuel Wharton, William Trent, and George Morgan in 1768. The traders had attempted to propose a new colony, Vandalia, which would have extended this territory into much of West Virginia and Kentucky, but their proposition never came to be.