Alabama in 1838 - Montgomery, Mobile, Tuscaloosa

Alabama's map in Thomas G. Bradford's 1838 An Illustrated Atlas, published by Weeks, Jordan & Co. and Wiley and Putnam, was printed nineteen years after Alabama's admission to the Union, in the middle of what contemporaries called "Alabama Fever" — a wave of migration from the older Southern states that, following the removal of the Creek and Cherokee nations earlier in the decade, more than doubled the state's population in barely a generation as cotton planters raced to claim the newly opened land. George W. Boynton engraved the sheet at roughly 1:1,650,000.

Rivers, lakes, cities, and early transportation routes are laid out across the map in the atlas's signature hand-applied county color — a snapshot of a frontier state still being carved into counties as fast as the cotton boom could fill them.

Alabama natives and their descendants tend to want this one, a transplant who's kept ties to the state, or a collector adding to a shelf of Bradford's 1838 maps. Sold unframed, it's available in a variety of sizes.