Kentucky, Tennessee and Illinois in 1823 - Louisville, Memphis, Kaskaskia

Henry Schenck Tanner of Philadelphia issued this map of Kentucky, Tennessee, and part of Illinois in 1823 for his monumental American Atlas, a work without question regarded as the finest of all nineteenth-century American commercial atlases and the first large-format domestic atlas to match the engraving quality of its European rivals. Tanner conceived the project as the first systematic large-format mapping of the United States, issuing it in subscription folio groups from 1819 before the completed bound atlas finally appeared in 1823, and separate maps from it are scarce on the market today. This is a rare early state of the plate, identifiable by its inclusion of Illinois in the title and by nine newly created, still-unnamed counties shown with boundaries in western Tennessee, a frontier region only just being organized as settlement pushed toward the Mississippi.

Louisville, Kentucky's largest town at the falls of the Ohio River, anchors the map's northern half and the network of roads and mileage markers Tanner records between major towns. Memphis and Fort Pickering, still fledgling settlements on the Chickasaw Bluffs above the Mississippi, mark the western edge of Tennessee's newly organized counties. The map extends the Mississippi River's coverage north to St. Louis and the mouth of the Missouri River, illustrating how tightly the Ohio and Mississippi River valleys were bound together commercially in the 1820s. Kaskaskia, Illinois's first territorial and state capital on the Mississippi's east bank, anchors the small slice of southern Illinois included on the sheet, a detail that ties the map's three states into a single connected river system.

This map suits a family with roots across Kentucky, Tennessee, or southern Illinois, or a collector seeking out Tanner's celebrated American Atlas, now scarce as individual sheets. The store also carries Anthony Finley's single-state 1823 Tennessee map; that narrower sheet omits both Kentucky and Illinois, while this Tanner edition captures the full tri-state Ohio-Mississippi river system and the unusual unnamed western Tennessee counties in the same pivotal year. It is available unframed in a range of sizes.