Connecticut in 1834 - Hartford, New Haven, Bridgeport

Anthony Finley of Philadelphia published this map of Connecticut in 1834, near the end of a remarkable run as the dominant American mapmaker of the early 1820s and 1830s. Finley's atlas, first issued in 1824, quickly outsold rival publications from Carey & Lea and Tanner on the strength of its elegant engraving style, high-quality paper, and topographical detail, features the firm maintained by correcting and updating its plates nearly every year the atlas remained in print. This map of Connecticut, colored by county and showing towns, roads, railroads, lakes, rivers, and mountains, represents one of the finest state maps produced during Finley's most productive decade.

Hartford, the state capital and one of two joint capitals until 1875, anchors the Connecticut River valley at the heart of the map, while New Haven, home to Yale College and a major shipping port on Long Island Sound, and Bridgeport, then still a modestly sized manufacturing town on the cusp of its industrial expansion, mark the state's other principal centers. The map's inclusion of early railroad lines, still a novelty in American cartography in 1834, reflects Connecticut's position at the leading edge of New England's transportation revolution, with lines beginning to link the state's coastal ports to its interior manufacturing towns. Finley's characteristically fine engraving renders the state's dense network of townships and waterways with a clarity that made his atlases the standard reference of the period.

This map is a fitting gift for a family with Connecticut roots, for a transplant now settled in Hartford or New Haven, or for a collector of Finley's celebrated 1820s and 1830s state atlas. It is offered unframed in a range of sizes.