Arkansas in 1836 - Little Rock, Washington, Batesville

This is a second surviving example of David Hugh Burr's 1836 map of Arkansas, printed from the same New York plate as the earliest edition of the map but preserved here as an individually cataloged copy. Burr's Arkansas remains the earliest printed map to show the state in its final statehood configuration, issued the same year Arkansas entered the Union as the twenty-fifth state, and it stands among the most celebrated productions of an atlas widely regarded as the most elegant American commercial cartography of its decade. Burr had trained under Simeon DeWitt in New York and went on to serve as topographer for the United States Post Office, a role that gave him access to survey data most contemporary publishers could not match.

Courthouses, towns, post offices, roads, rivers, and lakes appear across the sheet in the same fine engraving and wash coloring found on the first example of this map, tracing Little Rock's position along the Arkansas River, the frontier outpost of Washington in the state's southwest, and Batesville on the White River to the north. Because so few towns and roads had been established by 1836, the map reads as a genuinely sparse frontier document, its county boundaries still far from their modern shape. As a second surviving example of a scarce and important plate, it offers Arkansas collectors an alternate opportunity to acquire this landmark statehood-year map.

This map is a fitting gift for a family with Arkansas roots, for a transplant now settled in the Ozarks or the Arkansas River valley, or for a collector seeking a fine second example of Burr's celebrated 1836 plate. It is offered unframed in a range of sizes.