Lynchburg, Virginia - 1860s

I've had some success re-coloring some vintage battlefield maps. The first one I did in earnest was Gettysburg for the online IKS Grand Gettysburg game played over Tabletop Simulator last year.

In my search for American Civil War maps online, I came across this really great map of Lynchburg, Virginia at the Library of Congress website. The useable area of the map is about 10x10 miles. Anyway, it had some interesting use of watercolors by the original artist to portray the topography of a set of mountains at the bottom of the map but the rest of the map was just the typical hachures. I wanted to experiment with approximating water colors so I gave it a shot.

Here is a before and after of the center of the map:





Here is a link to the full map. It's designed for use in Tabletop Simulator so it isn't optimized for printing a physical copy yet, but I may do so in the future.

LYNCHBURG & VICINITY MAP

Looks good. Is the original from the OR? I think we use a version of it in our Scourge of War: GB online games.

m

What is the OR? This is where I got it from, at the Library of Congress

https://www.loc.gov/item/gvhs01.vhs00378/

Sorry, the OR is shorthand for the Official Records of the Union and Confederate Armies. 132 volumes, as I recall. It's a wonderful resource, full of contemporary reports, AARs, OOBs and strength-returns.

An atlas was produced to accompany it, and many of the maps were specially commissioned. I wondered whether it was it was one of those.

m

Ah, no, according to the entry this map was created by the Confederate Government itself in 1864, during the war

Great stuff, and unusually good quality for a contemporary map.  

The historical generals usually had to struggle with inferior ones, I think.  Sometimes very inferior ones. Prior to his campaign in East Tennessee in late 63, Bragg's staff gave Longstreet highly inaccurate maps.  They didn't even place some towns on the correct side of rivers