Early ALS signed “Geo. G Meade, Eng'r Miss'pi Survey,” one page, 8 x 9.75, January 16, 1837. Addressed from New Orleans, a handwritten letter to E. & G.W. Blunt, in part: “Your letter of the 2d. inst. directed to Mr. Liddell informing him of the shipment of the Tide Guages & Water Instruments was received today…In addition to acknowledging the receipt I have to inform you that on opening the instrument boxes the other day the Tripod to the Dumpy Level No. 1 was not to be found, as it must be with you, I have to request that you will forward it by the first packet consigning to Geo. E. Chase, 37 Natchez Street, New Orleans.” In very good to fine condition, with paper loss to the lower left corner, and show-through from mounting remnants on the back.
A considerably early letter from Meade that predates our other past examples by nearly a quarter-century. This letter dates to not much longer after Meade, just 21 years of age and already a veteran of the Second Seminole War, resigned from the United States Army. With his experience as an assistant surveyor on the construction of the Long Island Railroad, Meade returned to Florida and worked as a private citizen for his brother-in-law, James Duncan Graham, as an assistant surveyor to the United States Army Corps of Topographical Engineers on a railroad project. He conducted additional survey work for the Topographical Engineers on the Texas-Louisiana border, the Mississippi River Delta, and the northeastern boundary of Maine and Canada. Meade reentered the army in 1842 when a congressional measure excluded civilians from working in the Army Corps of Topographical Engineers.
Edmund March Blunt (1770-1862) founded a nautical bookstore in Newburyport, Massachusetts, in 1793 and soon expanded into nautical map and chart publishing. In 1802, Blunt moved his shop to New York, where he published and sold nautical books and charts, and sold and repaired nautical instruments. Blunt’s son, Edmund (1799-1866) became an assistant to Ferdinand Rudolph Hassler, conducting map surveys for the U.S. Coast Survey, and contributing surveys to his father’s publishing firm. In 1824, the younger Edmund and his brother George William Blunt (1802-1878) opened their own nautical supplies shop in New York, trading as E. & G.W. Blunt. They took over some of the publishing from their father’s firm and expanded into offering navigational instruments under the E. & G.W. Blunt name.
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