Iowa & Wisconsin Map 1845 Regional Print - Iowa City, Madison, Dubuque

Sidney Morse and Samuel Breese, working in New York, published this combined map of Iowa Territory and Wisconsin in 1845 as part of Morse's North American Atlas, issued by Harper & Brothers across nine illustrated parts sold for twenty-five cents apiece. Morse and Breese pioneered the cerographic wax-engraving process used here, and this particular sheet extends well beyond Iowa's eventual borders into land that would later become Minnesota and the Dakotas, recording Indian villages and early Native place names for rivers alongside the region's first American towns. Both Iowa and Wisconsin are shown as still-organizing territories at this date, Wisconsin only two years from statehood and Iowa nearly a decade further behind it on that same path toward the Union.

Iowa City anchors the Iowa side as that territory's capital, a new town on the Iowa River platted just two years before this map was drawn. Madison serves the same role for Wisconsin Territory, chosen for its position on an isthmus between two lakes rather than any prior settlement. The Mississippi River forms the eastern border of both territories, the single artery along which nearly all of the region's American settlement had so far proceeded. Together the two young capitals and the shared river border sketch a frontier still being organized township by township, well before either territory's boundaries had settled into their final form.

An Iowa or Wisconsin family with roots in this early territorial period will find this sheet catches a genuinely formative moment, and it suits a collector drawn to the sheet's inclusion of Indian villages and Native river names later dropped from commercial maps. The store also carries Iowa from Cram's 1878 railroad-and-township edition, printed after statehood and full settlement had transformed the territory shown here; this 1845 Morse sheet is the earliest Iowa map in the collection and the only one to pair it with Wisconsin. It's printed unframed and available in a range of sizes to fit whatever wall it's headed for.