Pennsylvania in 1859 - Harrisburg, Philadelphia, Allentown

This map of Pennsylvania, exhibiting the state's internal improvements, roads and distances, was drawn by J.H. Young and published in Philadelphia by Charles Desilver in 1859 as part of A New Universal Atlas. Desilver's atlas colored each county individually, showed relief by hachures and used Washington as its prime meridian, and this particular sheet went further than most contemporary state maps by adding two detailed insets, one covering the Lehigh and Schuylkill coal regions and another focused on the immediate vicinity of Philadelphia. Published on the eve of the Civil War, the map documents Pennsylvania at the height of its canal-and-coal economy, just before railroads would fully eclipse the water-borne transport network the map takes such care to record.

Harrisburg is marked as the state capital, its position on the Susquehanna making it a natural hub for the roads and canals radiating across the state. Philadelphia, treated to its own dedicated inset, appears as the commercial and shipping center anchoring Pennsylvania's southeastern corner. The Lehigh coal region, also given a separate inset, was by 1859 one of the most heavily mined anthracite districts in the country, its output moved along the canals the map was specifically built to illustrate. The Schuylkill coal region, mapped alongside it, formed the other pillar of Pennsylvania's anthracite industry, feeding furnaces and factories throughout the Mid-Atlantic. Together these insets highlight coal and canal transport as the state's defining economic engine.

This map is well suited to anyone with family history in the Lehigh or Schuylkill coal country, or in Harrisburg and Philadelphia, as well as collectors of Desilver's Universal Atlas. Pennsylvania buyers should also note we carry the state as mapped by Mitchell's own 1865 county edition, by Mitchell's 1860 sheet with New Jersey, Maryland and Delaware, and by Cram's 1875 railroad map of those same states; this 1859 Desilver edition stands apart for its dedicated coal-region insets and its focus on canals and internal improvements rather than counties alone. It is available unframed in a full range of sizes, from a compact study print to a larger statement piece.