James Wilson, the Farmer Who Made Globes

This is Bradford, home of James Wilson, the first person in the United States to make globes for sale. Wilson was born in seventeen sixty-three and raised on a farm, trained as a blacksmith, with little formal schooling. The story goes that on his way north to Vermont he stopped at Dartmouth College and saw a globe for the first time, and it seized him.

He settled here, taught himself geography, mapmaking, and engraving, and spent years learning to print and shape the curved paper that covers a sphere. In eighteen ten, from this small Vermont town, he produced and sold his first American globe. They were good enough to rival the expensive globes imported from Europe.

A self-taught New England farmer had built, with his own hands, an instrument that put the whole world in an American schoolroom.