Indiana in 1838 - Indianapolis, Fort Wayne, Evansville

Indiana appears in Thomas G. Bradford's 1838 An Illustrated Atlas, published by Weeks, Jordan & Co. and Wiley and Putnam roughly two decades after Indiana became a state. The state was deep into an ambitious, ultimately overextended internal-improvements program in this period — canals, roads, and railroads all funded at once by state bonds — with the Wabash and Erie Canal still under construction and years away from the financial reckoning that would leave Indiana nearly bankrupt by the early 1840s. This map, engraved by George W. Boynton at a scale of about 1:1,267,200, uses Washington as its prime meridian.

County lines are picked out in pastel hand-applied color across the state's neat rectangular outline, a hallmark of the atlas's clean, legible style — a tidy political map for a state whose finances, behind the scenes, were considerably less tidy.

A fitting pick for an Indiana native, a Hoosier who's since relocated but still claims the state, or a collector adding to a shelf of Bradford's 1838 state maps. The print ships unframed and comes in a variety of sizes.