Maryland & Delaware Map 1842 Regional Print - Baltimore, Wilmington, Dover

Henry S. Tanner, working out of Philadelphia, issued this Maryland and Delaware sheet in 1842 as part of his New Universal Atlas, the last edition he personally published, built on three decades of a reputation for accurate surveys and unusually thorough transportation detail. This particular printing carries a detailed inset of Baltimore, its street grid and landmarks rendered with a precision most state atlases of the period reserved for only a handful of major cities, hand-colored and engraved by E. Gillingham to separate Maryland's and Delaware's counties at a glance. The sheet covers both states jointly, mapping a Mid-Atlantic corridor where Baltimore's status as a Chesapeake port and a terminus of the young Baltimore and Ohio Railroad, chartered in 1827, was already reshaping the region's economy around rail and water trade together.

Baltimore anchors the sheet's inset, its street layout and landmarks singled out for a level of urban detail the rest of the map doesn't extend elsewhere. The Chesapeake Bay dominates the composition, splitting Maryland's Eastern Shore from its mainland counties and forcing the canals and roads the map's title promises to route around it rather than across it. Those canals include the Chesapeake and Delaware Canal, opened in 1829, which had cut a direct water link between the Chesapeake and Delaware Bay and, by doing so, tied the two states' shipping trade together years before this sheet went to press. Together the bay, the canal, and Baltimore's own port sketch a region whose 1842 economy ran almost entirely on water before rail fully took over.

For a Maryland or Delaware family with Chesapeake or Baltimore roots, or a collector building out the region's mid-19th-century maps, this sheet has a specific pull. The store also carries Maryland and Delaware combined in Cram's 1893 edition, and split into separate sheets in Bradford's 1838 atlas; this 1842 Tanner sheet sits between them chronologically, newer than Bradford's separate state maps but predating Cram's later combined edition by half a century, and unlike either it foregrounds canals and Baltimore's street grid over railroads. It's printed unframed and available in a range of sizes to fit whatever wall it's headed for.