Virginia in 1838 - Richmond, Norfolk, Alexandria

This Virginia sheet is part of Thomas G. Bradford's 1838 An Illustrated Atlas, published by Weeks, Jordan & Co. and Wiley and Putnam. Virginia by 1838 was a state increasingly overshadowed economically by the newer cotton states to its south, its tobacco-based plantation economy in relative decline even as slavery remained central to its politics and society — tensions that had only sharpened since Nat Turner's 1831 rebellion in Southampton County, which had pushed the state legislature into a fierce but ultimately unsuccessful debate over gradual emancipation before hardening into stricter slave codes instead. George W. Boynton engraved the map at a scale of roughly 1:1,900,800.

The Chesapeake Bay dominates the state's eastern edge, hand-colored in the atlas's characteristic outline style alongside county boundaries across the rest of the map — the bay and its tobacco ports still the state's commercial lifeline even as its economic center of gravity was shifting elsewhere.

This one suits a Virginia family with generations of history in the Old Dominion, someone who's moved away but still calls it home, or a collector chasing a full set of Bradford's 1838 state maps. The print ships unframed and is available in multiple sizes.