Details
Title Heap, Gwinn Harris
Alternate title Heap, Gwynn Harris
Heap, Gwynne Harris
Date March 23, 1817-March 7, 1887
Description Gwinn Harris Heap, a draftsman, legal indexer, diplomat, and camel agent, born in Chester, Pennsylvania on March 23, 1817, delineated views of the West printed by P. S. Duval in the 1850s. Heap was the son of Samuel Davies Heap (1781-1853), a naval surgeon, and Margaret Porter (1791-1858). His uncle was Commodore David Porter (1780-1843), his grandfather was Pennsylvania judge John Heap (1750-1828), and his great-grandfather was George Heap (ca. 1715-1752) who, with Nicholas Scull, surveyed and drew one of the earliest published maps of Philadelphia (1752).
Heap's diverse career was likely influenced by his youth spent overseas while his father served four terms as American consul at Tunis between 1825 and 1853. Much of his own life was spent in civil service, including positions as vice- and acting-consul at Tunis (1839-1840), as consul at Belfast, Northern Ireland (1866-1867) and Tunis (1867-1878), and as consul-general at Constantinople from 1878 through his death there on March 7, 1887.
However, from 1846 to 1855 Heap was employed as a clerk in Washington, D.C., where he compiled the cumulative index to the first edition of the "United States Public Statutes at Large" (A Synoptical Index to the Laws and Treaties of the United States of America, from March 4, 1789 to March 3, 1851, 1852). In 1853 he traveled across the country with his cousin Edwin Fitzgerald Beale (1822-1893) to survey a possible route for a transcontinental railroad. Heap kept a diary and sketched scenes during their trip, thirteen of which were lithographed by P. S. Duval to illustrate their "Central Route to the Pacific, from the Valley of the Mississippi to California: "Journal of the Expedition of E. F. Beale, Superintendent of Indian Affairs in California," and Gwinn Harris Heap, "From the Missouri to California in 1853" (Philadelphia, 1854). Afterward, Heap and Beale became involved with the short-lived War Department initiative of importing camels from the Near East for use as pack animals in the American Southwest.
Is part of Philadelphia on Stone Biographical Dictionary of Lithographers
References See Duval, P. S.
Call number Philadelphia on Stone Biographical Dictionary of Lithographers
Bibliographic citation Dawdry, Artists of the American West, 110-11
Emery, "Gwinn Harris Heap," Legal Reference Services Quarterly, 18:2, 101-04
Groce & Wallace, 305
Jones, Genealogy of the Rodman Family, 165
Perry, Carthage and Tunis, Past and Present, 550-51
Philadelphia Inquirer, March 19, 1887
Peters, California on Stone, 115, 128
Twentieth Century Biographical Dictionary of Notable Americans, 5