Mississippi Map 1846 State Print - Jackson, Natchez, Vicksburg

Samuel Augustus Mitchell published this detailed map of Mississippi in Philadelphia in 1846, part of the prolific atlas business he had built after relocating to the city around 1830, disillusioned with the quality of the geography textbooks then available to American schools. Mitchell's early cartographic output began with a re-issue of Anthony Finley's New American Atlas, but by the 1840s his firm had grown into one of the country's leading publishers of standalone state maps, distinguished for combining hand-colored county boundaries with practical travel information rarely found on competing atlases. This Mississippi sheet is hand-colored by county and includes tables of steamboat routes and distances, a genuinely useful feature for travelers navigating a state still heavily dependent on river transport. Mitchell's pre-1850 maps have become increasingly scarce, this example capturing Mississippi two decades after statehood as its plantation economy reached full maturity.

Jackson continues to serve as the state capital at the center of the map, while Natchez remains the dominant river port of the old Natchez District on the Mississippi. Vicksburg appears further north on a commanding bluff above the river, already established as one of the state's most strategically important towns. The Pearl and Yazoo rivers are traced in detail as they drain the state's rich cotton lands, and the map extends south to the Gulf coast, recording Biloxi and the Pascagoula River among the smaller settlements along the shore. Roads, railroads and steamboat distances are layered together across the sheet, reflecting a transportation network by now considerably more developed than Finley's map of two decades earlier.

This map makes a fitting gift for a Mississippi family with roots along the river towns of Natchez or Vicksburg, or for a collector seeking Mitchell's increasingly scarce pre-1850 state maps. Coming more than twenty years after the store's Finley edition, this 1846 Mitchell sheet shows Mississippi's county system essentially complete and its steamboat and road network fully built out, a useful contrast for anyone comparing the state's cartographic development decade by decade. It is available unframed in a full range of sizes, from a compact print for a hallway to a large-format piece for a study or office.