Arkansas Map 1841 State Print - Little Rock, Fayetteville, Fort Smith

Henry S. Tanner, working out of Philadelphia, issued this Arkansas sheet in 1841, included in the 1842 edition of his New Universal Atlas, the last he personally published after three decades spent building a reputation as one of America's most trusted cartographers. This printing includes a detailed table of distances alongside its canal, road, and river network, a practical layer aimed at travelers navigating a state still very much a frontier by the standards of the rest of the atlas. The sheet maps Arkansas statewide, only five years after its 1836 admission to the Union, a young state whose interior remained thinly settled and whose infrastructure was still catching up to its older neighbors east of the Mississippi.

Rivers dominate the sheet's geography, the primary routes by which goods and people actually moved through a state where roads remained rudimentary outside its more established counties. The distance table converts that river geography into practical travel information, listing how far apart Arkansas's scattered towns and county seats actually sat from one another. County boundaries are laid out in distinct colors, a standard Tanner convention that here highlights just how unevenly settled the state still was, with counties clustering in the east along the Mississippi and thinning out toward the Ozark uplands further west. Together the rivers, the distances, and the county pattern sketch a young state still being filled in county by county.

For an Arkansas family with early statehood-era roots, or a collector building out the state's mid-19th-century maps, this sheet has a specific pull. The store also carries Arkansas from Cram's 1893 edition, from a combined Arkansas-Louisiana-Mississippi sheet in Cram's 1883 edition, and from Bradford's 1838 atlas; this 1841 Tanner sheet is the only one of the group to map Arkansas on its own with a dedicated distance table rather than folding it into a regional sheet. It's printed unframed and available in a range of sizes to fit whatever wall it's headed for.