Missouri Map 1845 State Print - Jefferson City, St. Louis, Independence

Sidney Morse and Samuel Breese, working in New York, published this map of Missouri in 1845 as part of Morse's North American Atlas, issued by Harper & Brothers across nine illustrated parts sold for twenty-five cents apiece. Morse and Breese pioneered the cerographic wax-engraving process used to print the map, a technique cheaper than copper-plate engraving that let Harper's sell four full-color maps per part at a fraction of the price of comparable engraved sheets, and this sheet carries an explanation panel decoding its symbols for towns, roads, railroads, and canals. Missouri is shown here roughly a generation after statehood, its settlement still concentrated along the Missouri and Mississippi rivers with the western prairie only lightly organized into counties.

Jefferson City anchors the map as the state capital, a river town on the Missouri chosen in 1826 for its central position rather than any prior commercial standing. St. Louis appears near the state's eastern edge on the Mississippi, already the dominant commercial gateway for goods and settlers moving into the trans-Mississippi West. The Missouri River cuts across the state's midsection and the Mississippi forms its entire eastern border, the two rivers together carrying nearly all of the state's trade at this date. Together the capital and the two rivers describe a state whose growth still followed its waterways almost exclusively, decades before the railroads would reorganize its geography.

A Missouri family with roots in the old river counties will recognize this sheet's world immediately, and it suits a collector marking the state before the rail era remade its economy. The store also carries Missouri from Cram's 1878 railroad-and-township edition and his later 1893 and 1883 printings, all drawn after rail lines had reorganized the state's trade around Kansas City as much as St. Louis; this 1845 Morse sheet is the earliest Missouri map in the collection. It's printed unframed and available in a range of sizes to fit whatever wall it's headed for.