Rhode Island in 1838 - Providence, Newport, Block Island

This Rhode Island map comes from Thomas G. Bradford's 1838 An Illustrated Atlas, published by Weeks, Jordan & Co. and Wiley and Putnam and considered his best atlas work. By 1838, Rhode Island's textile mills along the Blackstone and Pawtuxet Rivers had already made the smallest state one of the most industrialized places in the country, a legacy of Samuel Slater's original Pawtucket mill from the 1790s — and the political tension that industrial growth created, between an old land-owning class and a rapidly swelling mill-town population with no vote, was only a few years from boiling over into the Dorr Rebellion. Engraved by George W. Boynton at a scale of about 1:290,000, the sheet devotes real detail to one of the original thirteen colonies despite its small footprint.

A dedicated inset of Block Island sits alongside the main map, hand-colored by county in the atlas's signature style, giving equal weight to the mainland's mill towns and the isolated island a few miles off the coast.

This one tends to land with a Rhode Island family, especially anyone with ties to the old mill towns along the Blackstone, or with someone who's left New England behind and wants a piece of Ocean State history on the wall. It also suits a collector building out Bradford's 1838 state series one sheet at a time. Offered unframed, in multiple print sizes.