David Jesse

Detroit Free Press

A rare, hand-drawn 1790 map of Detroit has been discovered in a family home in Ontario. The framed 21-by-40-inch map is now part of the University of Michigan's William L. Clements Library collection and shows the city under British rule.

"The grandson of the original owner said that the map was bought by his grandfather sometime back in the 1930s," said Brian Dunnigan, curator of maps and associate director of the Clements Library in a news release. "This is a really special find because there aren't any other maps that depict Detroit at this particular time period, which was about six years before the British peacefully evacuated the town and fort to make way for the arrival of United States troops."

The hand-colored map is titled, "Rough sketch of the King's Domain at Detroit." It was drawn on high-quality, watermarked 18th-century paper, signed by its author, D.W. Smith (Capt. David William Smith) and dated September 1790.

According to Dunnigan, who is an expert in early Detroit history and author of "Frontier Metropolis: Picturing Early Detroit," the map identifies the east and west boundaries of the "Domain," an extra-wide ribbon strip of land that Antoine Laumet de La Mothe Cadillac, founder of Detroit, granted to himself in 1701.

The map includes many new details of the frontier city, he said. Within the platted ground of the Domain is a very specific plan of the town, its defenses, and Fort Lernoult, constructed during the American Revolution and located at what is today the intersection of Fort and Shelby streets. It also includes proposed fortifications that were never constructed.

Because it includes a number of parcels of land bearing numbers, Dunnigan believes the map was once accompanied by a key or a report that has not yet been found.

Smith's plan captures Detroit at a significant time in its history — in 1790, U.S. troops were advancing on the Indian villages of northern Indiana and thus threatened the British garrison at Detroit.

The Clements holds at least one other Detroit work by the map's author, David William Smith, who was then a captain in the British Army assigned to Detroit. Smith went on to serve as surveyor general of Upper Canada (today Ontario) from 1792 to 1802.

The library's collection includes several dozen plans of Detroit, charting its growth from 1749 until 1900; a depiction of colonial Detroit in the papers of Gen. Thomas Gage; manuscript collections of 18th- and 19th-Century Detroit families; the papers of Josiah Harmar that reveal U.S. plans to occupy Detroit in 1790 — the same date as the Smith map; and photos picturing Detroit in the 19th Century.

Contact David Jesse: 313-222-8851 or djesse@freepress.com. Follow him on Twitter: @reporterdavidj