Crap In The Attic

Those of you who have, for some inexplicable reasons of your own hung around here for many a long year might remember tales from my attic. Some may even recall the creature that lives up there, lurking in the dark corners, always just on the edge of sight, making occasional scurrying and crunching noises as it catches and eats its prey.
Yup, I was up there again last weekend and "The Thing That Eats Spiders" is still there.
Considering how many spiders I have in the rest of my house the fact that I have never seen a single one in the attic led me some years back to the inevitable conclusion that something up there eats them.

I like spiders as a rule. They're clean, they don't require any looking after and they eat those filthy flies and bugs that shit all over your food. A cobweb at the kitchen window makes for a great flyscreen, and a pretty entertaining one at times.
But we also have the 'giant house spider' here (Tegenaria duellica), a monstrous bastard, tales and photographs of which I have posted in the past but no way am I going to go and look at them again now. And those, together with the lanky scuttling things that come in here off the fields at harvest time and startle the crap out of me, make me glad that The Thing That Eats Spiders lives up in my attic. It's nice to know that I can rummage around up there in the semi-darkness and not find a bunch of six inch wide, fifteen mile-an-hour hairy bastards running up my arms.

Anyhoo …
Apart from the lack of spiders, there are many and varied wonders in my attic. Fifty-two years worth of accumulated crap to be precise. Together with some useful stuff I have no room for down here in the land where spiders live.
Every once in a while I find I need something that's stored somewhere in a box in the attic, so I head on up there and come down a couple of days later with boxes full of crap I never knew I had, having completely forgotten what it was I went up there for in the first place.

Last weekend I happened upon a box full of old prints and maps going right back to the 1700s; stuff I had picked up over the decades either because it seemed like a good idea at the time or because it came in a job lot with an item I actually wanted.
The box was labelled "Unframed stuff" and in it I found something that might interest those of you living in our Lost Colonies.

This is a Lowry map of your neck of the woods from back in 1802.
A couple of you I know live in places that are actually marked on here, but most of you now live in what was then wild and uncharted wildernesses of guesswork, peopled with the occasionally mis-spelled names of the folk who lived there before the blessings of civilisation rained down upon their heads.

 Here's an enlargement of the middle part of the map. Click on either of these pictures; I've saved them so they blow up pretty big, so they may take a couple of seconds to load.
I must confess to sitting here for ages, wasting my time in a pleasant yet futile manner, figuring out where you all live and what has happened in those places since this map was drawn.

From over here in the Ancient World, folk in the US of A seem somewhat obsessed with history, probably because their own has as yet been so brief. It would be nice to learn a little bit of the history of those parts where you now live, like when your settlements were founded, what happened to the people who lived there originally, what your town or city has become known for and any other little snippets of history that might startle or entertain us.
Write 'em here in the comments or do a post of your own about them (Robyn and Petrea get a pass on this one for all the excellent work they already do detailing local history online).
I'd love to know.

Ooh, ooh! A quick addendum:
I just remembered there are big, fold-out maps in my lovely eleven volume 1756 edition of Smollett's "History of England" (the brown ones in the eighth photo down in my "Pimp My Dante" post) and I'm pretty sure the Colonies are in there somewhere.
I shall have a rummage and scan in what I find for the next post.
Hooray for old crap!