Louisiana in 1836 - New Orleans, Baton Rouge, Monroe

David Hugh Burr published this map of Louisiana from Brattleboro, Vermont in 1836, drawing on his position as official topographer for the U.S. Post Office through the 1830s, a role that gave him access to survey data most private mapmakers of the period could not obtain on their own. Burr, who had trained as a surveyor under Simeon DeWitt in New York and had already produced the second state atlas ever issued in the country, brought that same surveying rigor to this Louisiana sheet, rendering it in striking full original color. The map records Louisiana just twenty-four years after statehood, when the parish system in the state's north and west remained genuinely primitive, with only seven parishes covering the entire western half of the state. It captures a Louisiana still very much in the process of being subdivided, years before the railroad building that would reorganize the state's interior later in the century.

The seven parishes then covering Louisiana's north and west stand in sharp contrast to the far finer subdivision already established closer to New Orleans and the older Gulf Coast settlements. Early roads are shown crossing the state, but the map notes that few of them run all the way from north to south, leaving much of the interior connected only by river rather than overland routes. Monroe, on the Ouachita River in the state's northeast, sits within this thinly parished frontier as one of the few established towns anchoring the region. The north and west are shown still dominated by Indian lands and open prairie, a landscape the map records just before the rapid parish subdivision of the following decades began in earnest.

This 1836 Burr edition is a strong choice for a Louisiana family with roots in the state's less-settled northern parishes, a Monroe-area transplant, or a collector drawn to Burr's reputation as one of the most important surveyor-mapmakers of the era. It is the earliest of the store's seven Louisiana maps by two decades, predating even Colton's 1855 edition, and its seven-parish rendering of the state's north and west offers a strikingly undeveloped picture compared to the fully subdivided parish grids shown on every later Louisiana sheet in this collection. It ships unframed and is available in a full range of sizes.