John Farmer map of Michigan, 1853

Summary

John Farmer’s Map of the State of Michigan and the Surrounding Country (Detroit, 1853, twenty-third edition) is a land-survey map rather than a chart or a narrative one. Its own cartouche says so: “Exhibiting the Sections and the latest surveys. Compiled from authentic sources by John Farmer.” It is contemporaneous with James Jesse Strang’s kingdom on Beaver Island, which ran from 1850 to 1856.

What the sheet shows in the archipelago

Big Beaver I. is lettered in large type across the group, with High I., Gull I., Trout Is. and Whiskey I. printed around it, and Garden and Hog islands drawn to the east. Radiating dotted lines cross the open lake — the sailing and distance lines a commercial sheet of this period carried.

The most informative thing on it is not a name but a tint. Big Beaver Island is drawn coloured and ruled with the rectangular survey grid; the outer islands — High, Trout, Gull, Whiskey — are drawn as plain outlines with no grid at all. On a map whose stated purpose is exhibiting the sections, that difference is a statement about where the General Land Office survey had reached by 1853, and it matches the survey record this archive holds: the 1849 field notes cover Big Beaver in subdivision detail while the outer islands appear as shorter island surveys and general descriptions — see the GLO field-note volumes.

So Farmer’s sheet is, among other things, a picture of the frontier of surveying: the island that could be sold in sections is drawn as sections, and the ones that could not are drawn as shapes.

Scale, and why the islands are coarse

The sheet is a whole-state map and then some: it runs from Lake Erie to Lake Superior, carries the Canadian shore and the international boundary on the east, and sets an inset plan of the copper district into the Lake Huron margin. A reference panel at lower left keys the line symbols — state, county and township lines, roads, plank roads and railroads — against a scale of statute miles.

That scope is the reason the archipelago is drawn the way it is. The islands sit in the upper-left quarter of a sheet whose subject is the Lower Peninsula’s counties and sections, and they get the treatment a distant corner gets: correct in name and roughly in position, with the survey grid where a survey existed and an outline where none did. Nothing here is drawn from a coastline survey, and the shapes should not be measured against a chart — for that, the Lake Survey sheets are the evidence, and they are built from trigonometrical work the state map never had.

What the sheet is good for is the administrative and tenurial frame: which ground was surveyed, which county it was attached to, and what a purchaser in Detroit could have been shown about it in 1853.

A name not legible here

North Fox Island is lettered with an alternate — the engraving reads “North Fox I. or ———” — but the second name cannot be read with confidence in the held scan, which does not carry enough resolution at that point. It is recorded here as present and unread rather than guessed at; the 1866 Farmer edition, also held, may settle it. Alternate island names are tracked in the toponymy survey.

Evidence and limits

Farmer compiled; he did not survey. “Compiled from authentic sources” is the sheet’s own description, and a twenty-third edition is a plate carried forward and corrected over years, so a feature’s presence here does not date it to 1853. The map is good evidence of what a Detroit publisher could state about the sections in 1853 and weaker evidence of anything on the ground.

In particular it establishes nothing about settlement, occupancy or population on the islands during the Strang years, and the survey grid it prints is a legal abstraction laid over country that Anishinaabe communities had long occupied — a point the grid itself is designed not to show. For the English name’s earlier printed history see Mitchell’s 1755 map.

Added 2 August 2026 · revised 4 August 2026. Recent changes