226 
BAKER. 
Yonkers or Youngstown of today. Waterbury, Connecticut, 
wijbh a population of 29,000, is a little larger than was Phila¬ 
delphia in 1790. Boston contained a population of 18,000 ; 
Charleston, South Carolina, 16,000; Baltimore, 13,000, and 
Salem, Massachusetts, 8,000. After these only thirteen others, 
all still smaller, find a place in the first census. 
Maine was a province of Massachusetts, with a northeastern 
boundary undefined and awaiting an international boundary 
conference for its determination. Most of its territory then 
was, as some still is, barely explored. To the north, then as 
now, was a British province; to the west and south, Spanish 
possessions. This phrase Spanish possessions must here be 
taken in a Pickwickian sense, for these regions owned by 
Spain were still almost exclusively possessed by the aborigines. 
Traveling was chiefly done on horseback and by stages. 
The days of railroads and steamboats were in the future. 
Even the system of canals and national highways, so much 
exploited in the early decades of the century, was not yet 
begun. 
Of maps of the region there were several, fairly good for 
their time. None of them, however, were based on surveys. 
The maps of Thomas Jefferys, geographer to King George 
during the revolutionary period, are as a whole the best, and 
fairly representative of the geographic knowledge thetL exist¬ 
ing. While these maps of Jefferys, as well as others, recorded 
the best geographic information then extant, it does not ap¬ 
pear that the information they contained was widely diffused. 
General ignorance as to geography must have been great. 
Noah Webster, the lexicographer, writing in 1840, says of 
the teaching in the schools when he was a boy : 
“When I was young, or before the Revolution, the books used were 
chiefly or wholly Dilworth’s spelling books, the Psalter, Testament, and 
Bible. No geography was studied before the publication of Dr. Morse’s 
small books on that subject, about the year 1786 or 1787. * * * Except 
the books above mentioned, no book for reading was used before the 
publication of the Third Part of my Institutes, in 1785. In some of the 
early editions of that book I introduced short notices of the geography 
and history of the United States, and this led to more enlarged descrip¬ 
tions of the country.” 
