Kentucky & Tennessee Map 1845 Regional Print - Frankfort, Louisville, Nashville

Sidney Morse and Samuel Breese, working in New York, published this combined map of Kentucky and Tennessee 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, a technique cheaper than copper-plate engraving that let Harper's price the atlas within reach of ordinary households, and this particular sheet includes a printed explanation panel decoding its symbols for roads, railroads, rivers, and canals. Both states are shown as fully settled parts of the upper South, their populations and county boundaries largely stable by this date even as the earliest rail lines were only beginning to supplement the older network of roads and rivers.

Frankfort anchors the Kentucky side as that state's capital, a comparatively small river town chosen for its central position between Louisville and Lexington. Nashville serves the same role for Tennessee, seated on the Cumberland River at the heart of the state's road and river network. The Ohio River forms Kentucky's entire northern border, while the Cumberland and Tennessee rivers cross Tennessee's interior, all three marked as the principal arteries for trade before rail lines had fully matured. Together the two capitals and three rivers describe a region whose transportation still ran mostly on water, with the new railroads only beginning to appear on the map's surface.

This paired sheet suits a Kentucky or Tennessee family with roots in either state's river towns, and it appeals equally to a collector who prefers a single combined view over two separate maps. The store also carries Kentucky and Tennessee together from Cram's later 1893, 1884, and 1883 editions, all printed after the railroads shown here only faintly had grown into a dense regional network; this 1845 Morse sheet is the earliest combined edition of the two states in the collection. It's printed unframed and available in a range of sizes to fit whatever wall it's headed for.