New Jersey in 1838 - Trenton, Newark, Camden

Thomas G. Bradford's An Illustrated Atlas, Geographical, Statistical, and Historical of the United States, published in Boston and New York by Weeks, Jordan & Co. and Wiley and Putnam in 1838, is widely regarded as Bradford's finest cartographic work, bound with a second title page engraved by James Archer. New Jersey in 1838 sat squeezed between two booming cities, its own economy quickening on the back of one of the country's earliest railroads, the Camden and Amboy, chartered in 1830 to move passengers and freight across the state faster than the turnpikes ever could. Trenton was already an iron and manufacturing town in its own right, not just a political capital, and this sheet, engraved by George W. Boynton at roughly 1:760,000, was reduced from T. Gordan's survey of the state.

Hand-painted in full color by county, the map places Trenton and Newark alongside the Delaware River, with the borders of Pennsylvania and New York bordering the state's western and northern edges — a reminder that New Jersey's fortunes in this period were tied directly to the two larger cities on either side of it.

New Jersey buyers with family roots in Trenton or Newark, or anyone who grew up in the shadow of Philadelphia and New York without quite belonging to either city, tend to respond to this one. It's also a natural pick for a collector assembling a run of Bradford's 1838 state-by-state atlas. Sold unframed, it comes in a full range of sizes.