Maine Map 1840 State Print - Portland, Bangor, Augusta

Henry S. Tanner, working out of Philadelphia, issued this Maine sheet in 1840, included in the 1842 edition of his New Universal Atlas, the last he personally published after three decades spent building a reputation as one of America's most trusted cartographers. This printing carries a detailed inset listing county and town population figures from 1820 through 1840, tracking two decades of demographic change in a level of statistical detail the atlas doesn't extend to every state. The sheet maps Maine statewide, a state still only twenty years removed from its 1820 separation from Massachusetts, its interior only partially settled even as its coastal towns had long been established fixtures of the New England shipping trade.

Portland and Bangor both appear by name on the sheet, anchoring the state's commercial life at opposite ends of its settled coast, Portland as the larger port and Bangor further north as a rising center of the lumber trade feeding off Maine's vast timber reserves. The Kennebec and Penobscot Rivers are both named as well, the two waterways that carried that timber and other goods down from Maine's interior forests to the coastal ports for shipment further south. The population inset, tracking two decades of county-by-county growth, captures a state still filling in even as its major towns had long been established. Together the rivers, the towns, and the population data sketch a state whose settlement was still actively pushing inland from an already-mature coast.

For a Maine family with Portland or Bangor roots, or a collector building out the state's mid-19th-century maps, this sheet has a specific pull. The store also carries Maine from Cram's later 1893 and 1883 editions, and from Bradford's 1838 atlas; this 1840 Tanner sheet is the only one of the group built around two decades of tracked population growth rather than railroad lines or a single city inset. It's printed unframed and available in a range of sizes to fit whatever wall it's headed for.