Kentucky & Tennessee Map 1884 County Print - Louisville, Nashville, Memphis

Samuel Augustus Mitchell Jr., working through Wm. M. Bradley & Bro. of Philadelphia, issued this Kentucky and Tennessee sheet in 1884, part of his New General Atlas published in 1886. This printing is hand-colored with relief shown through hachures, combining both states on a single sheet in the same pairing Cram's later reference atlases would also adopt, though built here from Mitchell's own independent county-level survey rather than Cram's cartography. The sheet maps Kentucky and Tennessee jointly, their counties laid out across a shared Ohio and Cumberland River geography that had tied the two states' economies together since well before either map was drawn.

County boundaries across both states are shaded distinctly, a granular administrative view spanning from Kentucky's northern border along the Ohio River down through Tennessee's own river and mountain geography. Railroads thread through both states, a network grown considerably since the antebellum decades captured in this collection's earlier Kentucky and Tennessee sheets. Rivers, including the Ohio, Cumberland, and Tennessee systems, are worked into the base map beneath the county and rail detail. Together the counties, the railroads, and the rivers sketch a pair of states whose 1884 economy had matured well past the stage-and-steamboat era of their earlier maps.

For a Kentucky or Tennessee family with late-19th-century roots, or a collector building out the two states' maps across the decades, this sheet has a specific pull. The store also carries Kentucky and Tennessee combined in Cram's 1893 and 1883 editions, separately in Bradford's 1838 atlas, and separately again in Tanner's earlier 1839-41 sheets with their dedicated Louisville, Lexington, Nashville, and Knoxville insets; this 1884 Mitchell sheet is the third combined edition in the store, the only one built from Mitchell's own county-level cartography. It's printed unframed and available in a range of sizes to fit whatever wall it's headed for.