Delaware, Maryland, Virginia & West Virginia Map 1884 County Print - Baltimore, Richmond, Wilmington

Samuel Augustus Mitchell Jr., working through Wm. M. Bradley & Bro. of Philadelphia, issued this Delaware, Maryland, Virginia, and West Virginia sheet in 1884, part of his New General Atlas published in 1886. This printing is hand-colored with relief shown through hachures and carries two insets, adding detail the single combined map wouldn't otherwise have room to show across four states at once. The sheet maps all four states jointly, their counties laid out in Mitchell's characteristic style across a Chesapeake and Appalachian region whose economy and infrastructure had, by the 1880s, been substantially rebuilt since the Civil War's end.

The Chesapeake Bay dominates the sheet's eastern half, splitting Maryland's Eastern Shore from the mainland and anchoring Delaware and Maryland's shared maritime trade. West Virginia, admitted as its own state in 1863 during the war, appears here as an established mountainous western neighbor to Virginia rather than the still-new territory it would have been on earlier maps. Railroads thread through all four states, a rebuilt and expanded network connecting the region's coastal ports to its interior counties. Together the bay, West Virginia's now-settled statehood, and the rail network sketch a four-state region whose postwar reorganization had, by 1884, fully taken hold.

For a Delaware, Maryland, Virginia, or West Virginia family with late-19th-century roots, or a collector building out the region's maps across the decades, this sheet has a specific pull. The store also carries these four states combined in Cram's 1893 and 1883 editions, Maryland and Delaware combined in Tanner's earlier 1842 sheet, and Virginia separately in both Bradford's 1838 atlas and Tanner's own 1842 sheet; this 1884 Mitchell sheet is the third four-state combined edition in the store, the only one built from Mitchell's own county-level survey. It's printed unframed and available in a range of sizes to fit whatever wall it's headed for.