New Hampshire Map 1859 State Print - Concord, Manchester, Portsmouth

Joseph Hutchins Colton published this map of New Hampshire in New York in 1859, part of the atlas output that had, by mid-century, made his firm one of the most prolific American producers of guidebooks, railroad maps and general atlases. Colton had entered the map trade almost by accident, working first in a general store and then as a night clerk at the Hartford post office before setting up his publishing business in New York around 1831, and by the time of this New Hampshire sheet his firm was known for high-quality steel-plate engraving finished with decorative borders and hand-applied watercolor. This map is colored by township rather than simply by county, a finer level of administrative detail than most competing state maps of the period offered, and it captures New Hampshire three decades after Finley's earlier plate, its landscape now threaded by a genuinely dense railroad network.

Concord continues to anchor the state as capital, now linked by rail to Manchester, whose Amoskeag mills had by 1859 made it New Hampshire's largest and most industrially important city. Portsmouth remains the state's sole Atlantic port, and Nashua appears as another of the Merrimack Valley's fast-growing textile towns. Depots, post offices, rivers and railroads are all marked with unusual density across the map's southern half, tracking how thoroughly the state's mill-town economy had reorganized its transportation network since the 1820s. Lake Winnipesaukee and the White Mountains continue to anchor the state's central and northern thirds, by this date increasingly recognized as a summer tourist destination rather than merely rugged, lightly settled country.

This map suits a gift for a New Hampshire family with roots in its Merrimack Valley mill towns, or for a collector comparing successive editions of the state's cartographic development across the nineteenth century. The store's earlier 1829 Finley edition of New Hampshire, issued exactly thirty years before this one, offers a striking contrast, a state still largely defined by farm roads rather than railroads and mill depots. It is offered unframed in a full range of sizes, from a compact print for a study to a large-format piece for an office or hallway.