Kentucky in 1845 - Lexington, Frankfort, Louisville

Joseph Meyer's Bibliographisches Institut in Hildburghausen published this map of Kentucky in 1845, part of the firm's wide-ranging Meyers Universum series of steel-engraved geography and closely based on Tanner's American cartography of the early 1840s. Meyer's workshop was known across Europe for the exacting fineness of its steel engraving, and this sheet carries that continental polish even while following an essentially American source, giving it a crisper, more delicate line than the domestic Tanner and Mitchell maps it drew from. The map divides Kentucky by county and lays in the state's towns, roads, and river network in detail, with inset views covering Lexington and the area around Clarksburg alongside a close-up of the Falls of the Ohio. By the mid-1840s Kentucky was a settled, thoroughly subdivided state, its politics increasingly shaped by the same slavery debates dividing the country as a whole in the run-up to the Mexican-American War.

Lexington anchors the inset in the Bluegrass country, shown here as it was on the American originals this German edition follows, the commercial and social center of Kentucky's plantation belt. The Falls of the Ohio inset again singles out the stretch of river by Louisville, the same commercial chokepoint that made the town Kentucky's principal gateway for steamboat trade to Pittsburgh and New Orleans. The Clarksburg-area inset extends the map's detail to the state's Ohio River frontier, an important crossing zone on Kentucky's northern boundary. Together the three insets give the map an unusual density of local detail for a European-published sheet, closely tracking the same commercial geography the Tanner original had emphasized.

A German-published edition of an American state is a distinctive gift for a Kentucky family with European ancestry, a Bluegrass-region transplant, or a collector interested in how American geography circulated abroad in the 1840s. The store's other Kentucky maps include Tanner's own 1833 original this sheet is based on, Bradford's 1835 edition, and Carey's earlier 1814 map; this Meyer edition is the only one of the group not published in the United States, and its finer continental engraving sets it apart from its American source. It ships unframed and is available in a full range of sizes.