Rhode Island in 1814 - Providence, Newport, Warwick

Mathew Carey of Philadelphia published this map of Rhode Island in 1814 for his American Atlas, the pioneering work that in 1795 became the first folio atlas ever issued in the United States and that made Carey the first American publisher to offer hand coloring on his maps. This particular sheet is based on the surveys of Caleb Harris, redrawn by his relative Harding Harris, whose original 1795 survey had produced one of the earliest separately published maps of the state, and this example carries rare full original publisher's color rather than the cruder tinting common on later reissued copies. Rhode Island in 1814 remained the smallest of the original states, still governed under its 1663 colonial charter rather than a modern constitution, its economy and settlement still organized around historic town divisions rather than the industrial mill towns that would soon transform it.

Providence, the state's largest town and a rising center of shipping and early manufacturing, anchors the map's northern half at the head of Narragansett Bay. Newport, the older colonial seaport on Aquidneck Island, appears along the bay's outer reaches, still recovering from its occupation during the Revolution decades earlier. Warwick, one of Rhode Island's four original 1642 town foundations, sits along the bay's western shore amid the meadows and rivers the map records in detail. Topham Hill is individually marked, one of the modest high points the surveyors singled out in a state whose relief, as one account of the underlying survey put it, amounts to little more than what passes for hills in Rhode Island.

This map is a fitting gift for a Rhode Island family, a Providence or Newport transplant, or a collector building out a set of Carey's pioneering state atlas maps. Few early separately published maps of Rhode Island survive in this level of detail, making it a distinctive addition next to the store's other New England sheets from the same early federal period. It is available unframed in a range of sizes to suit any room.