New Hampshire & Vermont Map 1840 Regional Print - Concord, Montpelier, Manchester

Henry S. Tanner, working out of Philadelphia, issued this New Hampshire and Vermont 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. Engraved by J. and W.W. Warr, this printing pairs the two states on a single sheet bordered by a decorative title cartouche, with population and geographic data worked into accompanying tables, a standard Tanner convention applied here to two states that shared more in common with each other than with their larger New England neighbors. The sheet covers both states jointly, mapping a mountainous, still largely rural corner of New England whose economy in 1840 remained rooted in farming and small-scale milling rather than the textile manufacturing already transforming Massachusetts.

Both states' county boundaries are laid out in distinct colors, with rivers and mountain ranges worked into the base map beneath them even where individual peaks go unnamed on this particular sheet. The population tables give county-by-county figures for both states, a demographic snapshot that underscores just how sparsely settled much of northern New Hampshire and Vermont still were relative to the rest of the region. Roads link the scattered towns shown across both states, the primary transportation network available before rail had meaningfully reached this corner of the country. Together the counties, the population data, and the road network sketch two states whose 1840 character was still defined more by geography than by industry.

For a New Hampshire or Vermont family with rural or mill-town roots, or a collector building out the region's mid-19th-century maps, this sheet has a specific pull. The store also carries New Hampshire and Vermont combined in Cram's 1893 and 1883 editions, and separately in two 1838 Bradford sheets; this 1840 Tanner sheet sits between the two groups chronologically and, like the later Cram editions, pairs the states together rather than splitting them the way Bradford did. It's printed unframed and available in a range of sizes to fit whatever wall it's headed for.