Massachusetts in 1838 - Boston, Cape Cod, Nantucket

Massachusetts earned a full map in Thomas G. Bradford's 1838 An Illustrated Atlas, an atlas widely considered Bradford's best, printed in Boston and New York by Weeks, Jordan & Co. and Wiley and Putnam. By 1838 the state was the undisputed engine of American textile manufacturing — the mills at Lowell, founded barely a decade earlier, had already grown into one of the largest industrial complexes in the world, staffed largely by young farm women recruited from across New England. At the same time, Boston was becoming the center of the country's abolitionist movement, with William Lloyd Garrison's Liberator newspaper, launched in 1831, stirring a political fight that would only intensify in the decades ahead. George W. Boynton engraved the map at roughly 1:930,000.

The coastline gets particular attention on this sheet, with Massachusetts Bay, Cape Cod, Martha's Vineyard, and Nantucket all rendered along the state's Atlantic edge, county lines hand-painted in period color — a nod to the maritime trade that, alongside the mills, still drove much of the state's economy.

This sheet suits a Massachusetts native who grew up anywhere from the North Shore to the Berkshires, a Bay Stater who's since moved away and misses New England winters, or a collector working through Bradford's 1838 series state by state. Sold unframed, available in a range of sizes.