Georgia and South Carolina in 1856 - Savannah, Charleston, Atlanta

This paired city plan of Savannah and Charleston was engraved by George W. Colton for Colton's Atlas of the World, published by J.H. Colton & Co. of New York in 1856, the firm's first world atlas after decades spent issuing pocket maps and wall maps for other publishers. This particular one-volume 1856 printing is scarcer than the more common two-volume edition, and its full-color sheet sets Savannah's plan beside Charleston's, the pair ringed by an ornate decorative border rarely used elsewhere in the atlas. It covers Savannah, Georgia, and Charleston, South Carolina, two of the antebellum South's busiest cotton ports at a moment when both cities' economies were built almost entirely on the export trade moving through their harbors.

Savannah's half of the sheet includes a short written history of the city alongside its numbered squares and wards, a reflection of James Oglethorpe's original grid-and-square town plan still governing the city's layout more than a century after its founding. Charleston's plan, drawn without the same explanatory key, nonetheless numbers its own wards and lays out its street pattern along the harbor front in comparable detail. Atlanta, though not itself depicted on this coastal sheet, was in 1856 still a young rail town rapidly emerging as Georgia's inland transportation hub, a contrast to the older, harbor-built economies of Savannah and Charleston shown here. Together the two ports illustrate the Deep South's Atlantic coastal trade on the eve of the Civil War.

This sheet suits a buyer with roots in either port city, a collector building out a set of antebellum Southern coastal plans, or a gift for someone with ties to both Georgia and South Carolina at once. Our store also carries Charleston on its own in the 1861 Johnston/Rogers harbor-and-forts plan published in London: that sheet is a dedicated Charleston defense map with its forts picked out in red, while this 1856 Colton sheet is a paired Savannah-and-Charleston city view from an American world atlas, with no military detail at all. It's available unframed in a full range of sizes, from a compact study print to a larger statement piece.