Maine & New Hampshire Map 1858 Regional Print - Portland, Concord, Augusta

This map of Maine and New Hampshire was drawn by G.W. Colton with text by Richard Swainson Fisher and published in 1858 in Colton's Illustrated Cabinet Atlas and Descriptive Geography, a compact New York atlas. Its small cabinet page let Colton pair two modest states on a single sheet without crowding either one. The sheet depicts relief with hachures across the northern hills, colors each state's counties individually within an ornamental floral border, and marks towns and rivers in fine engraved line work by Davies and Roberts and George Russell and Co. Published in the years before the Civil War, the map records two sparsely populated northern New England states whose economies still rested heavily on timber, shipbuilding, and coastal fishing rather than the industry reshaping states further south.

Portland appears as Maine's principal port and largest town, its harbor central to the state's shipbuilding and timber trade with lumber floated down the Kennebec and Penobscot rivers to its wharves. Augusta, well inland on the Kennebec, is marked as the state capital, a modest seat of government compared to the busier coastal towns. Concord is shown as New Hampshire's capital, set among the state's interior hills rather than on its short stretch of coastline near the Piscataqua River. The Atlantic Ocean borders both states to the southeast, underscoring how much of their economy depended on maritime trade even this far north.

Maine's shipbuilding yards and New Hampshire's interior hill towns shared an economy long before either state industrialized, and this sheet captures that world, a fit for anyone with roots in either state or a collector rounding out northern New England from Colton's 1858 atlas. Because Maine and New Hampshire are paired on a single sheet here, this edition offers a more intimate regional view than the larger multi-state maps found elsewhere in the same atlas. It is available unframed in a full range of sizes, from a compact study print to a larger statement piece.