Connecticut Map 1839 State Print - Hartford, New Haven, Bridgeport

Henry S. Tanner, working out of Philadelphia, issued this Connecticut sheet in 1839, 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. Engraved by E.B. Dawson, this printing carries detailed insets of both Hartford and New Haven, a level of urban detail the atlas doesn't extend to every state, alongside a statistical table listing each county's population and county seat. The sheet maps Connecticut statewide, a small, long-settled state whose economy by 1839 had already begun shifting from its colonial-era farming and shipping base toward the early manufacturing that would define it later in the century.

Hartford and New Haven both receive their own inset maps, an unusual double treatment that reflects how the two cities split the state's civic and commercial weight between them, Hartford as an inland capital and insurance center, New Haven as a coastal port and college town. The statistical table lists population and county seats for each of Connecticut's counties, giving the sheet a demographic layer most single-state maps of the period leave out entirely. Roads and rivers are worked in around both insets, rounding out a map that reads as much like a civic reference document as a geographic one.

For a Connecticut family with Hartford or New Haven roots, or a collector building out the state's mid-19th-century maps, this sheet has a specific pull. The store also carries Connecticut combined with Massachusetts and Rhode Island in Cram's 1883 edition, and on its own in Bradford's 1838 atlas; this 1839 Tanner sheet is the only one of the group to give both Hartford and New Haven their own detailed insets rather than treating the state as a single undifferentiated sheet. It's printed unframed and available in a range of sizes to fit whatever wall it's headed for.