North Carolina in 1838 - Raleigh, Wilmington, Charlotte

This North Carolina sheet is part of Thomas G. Bradford's 1838 An Illustrated Atlas, published by Weeks, Jordan & Co. and Wiley and Putnam. North Carolina in this period carried a reputation among its neighbors as the "Rip Van Winkle State" — poorer, less developed, and slower to build the canals and railroads transforming Virginia and South Carolina on either side of it, a reputation the state's own leaders were only just beginning to push back against with a modest internal-improvements movement gaining traction in the legislature. George W. Boynton engraved the map at a scale of about 1:2,300,000, with the Appalachian Mountains rising along the state's western edge.

The Neuse River and Cape Fear River both wind toward the Atlantic across the map, county boundaries hand-colored in the atlas's characteristic style — a state whose rivers, more than any road or rail line yet built, still did most of the work of moving goods to market.

A natural pick for a North Carolina family, a Tar Heel who's carried the state with them after a move, or a collector adding to Bradford's 1838 series. The print ships unframed and comes in a variety of sizes.