Indiana Map 1841 State Print - Indianapolis, Fort Wayne, Terre Haute

Henry S. Tanner, working out of Philadelphia, issued this Indiana sheet in 1841, 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 J. Knight, this printing carries an inset profile of the Wabash and Erie Canal, charting its elevation changes with the same engineering precision Tanner brought to his other canal sheets, alongside a list of steamboat distances laid over the state's county divisions. The sheet maps Indiana statewide, twenty-five years after its 1816 admission to the Union, a state whose infrastructure ambitions were still actively under construction at the time this sheet was drawn.

The Wabash and Erie Canal's profile is the sheet's clear centerpiece, tracking one of the era's most ambitious American canal projects, intended to link Lake Erie to the Ohio River through the length of the state. Steamboat distances are listed alongside the canal detail, reflecting how much of Indiana's commerce still depended on water routes even as the canal pushed toward completion. County boundaries are shaded distinctly across the map, tracing a settlement pattern still filling in around the canal's projected path. Together the canal profile, the steamboat routes, and the counties sketch a state investing heavily in infrastructure that was, in 1841, still a work in progress.

For an Indiana family with canal-era or river-town roots, or a collector building out Indiana's 19th-century maps, this sheet has a specific pull. The store also carries Indiana from Bradford's 1838 atlas and Cram's later 1893 edition; this 1841 Tanner sheet is the only one of the group built around the Wabash and Erie Canal's engineering profile rather than a general reference view of the state. It's printed unframed and available in a range of sizes to fit whatever wall it's headed for.