By Michael Daniels

Sun Media Wire

BETHEL — On Saturday, Feb. 20, the Bethel Inn Conference Center will become a cartophile’s Terra Nova.

On display to the public, from 10 a.m. to 5 p.m., will be a spread of antique maps, some more than 300 years old, as well as early globes and surveying equipment.

At 2 p.m. forester and surveyor Barry M. Allen — a fifth-generation great-grandson of Jonathan Keyes, the first settler of Rumford — will speak on the early mapping of Maine and New England.

The display includes exotics — for example, a 1789 map depicting a bird’s-eye view of the Earth as seen from above the South Pole.

According to Stephen Seames, exhibit curator and designer, this map was copied from an original believed used by Captain James Cook in his own antipodean explorations.

But the local and more mundane are not slighted.

Also included are maps for the one-half land grant that makes up Woodstock and a recently unknown and rare map of the Stoneham, Albany and Waterford area.

There is also a manuscript map of North Yarmouth dating from 1687.

Surprisingly, when it comes to the distinction of “oldest in show,” even that 323-year-old document is a half-century too young.

The honor falls instead to a circa 1635 map of New Belgium and New England, by German cartographer (of the heavens as well as the earth) W.J. Blaue.

The map, “Nova Belgica et Anglia Nova” was produced by a process common to that period — it was first engraved on a large copper plate, then printed in black ink on heavy paper, then hand-colored or not, depending on the wishes of the buyer, Seames said.

As a result of the hand-coloring, he added, no two copies of the map are alike.

Afternoon talks
Allen’s talk on the early mapping of Maine and New England will be preceded, at 1:15, by a gallery walk by Frances L. Pollitt, who will point out and discuss highlights among the historic items on display. Pollitt works at the Maine Historical Society, for the Maine Memory Network, an online statewide museum of historical objects. She has also written the text for the recently published book “Historic Photos of Maine.”

Contributors to the upcoming exhibit include the Maine Historical Society, Andover Historical Society and local residents who have loaned items from their private collections.

The Feb. 20 presentation is the second in the Mahoosuc Land Trust’s “Local Knowledge 2010” series.

Admission is free, but donations are welcome. For more information, call 824-3806.

Stephen Seames is curator and designer of the “Early Mapping of Maine and New England” display at the Bethel Inn Conference Center that will be open for public viewing on Saturday, Feb. 20.