Washington City Map 1836 City Plan - Capitol, President's House, Georgetown

Henry S. Tanner, working out of Philadelphia, issued this City of Washington plan in 1836, included in the 1842 edition of his New Universal Atlas, the last he personally published after three decades spent building a reputation as one of America's most trusted cartographers. This printing includes a plan of the Capitol building's principal floor alongside the city's street grid, a level of architectural detail rare for a general atlas rather than a dedicated city guide, its wards and sections rendered in Tanner's characteristic hand-coloring. The sheet maps the federal city itself, still following the wide-avenue, public-square layout of the L'Enfant Plan that had shaped Washington's design from its founding as the nation's capital.

The Capitol and the President's House both appear by name on the sheet, the two buildings anchoring the city's civic core and its identity as the seat of federal government. A numbered reference list keys specific department buildings and public sites to the city grid, a practical navigational aid for a city still filling in around its planned avenues. The Potomac River and the Eastern Branch, now the Anacostia, bound the city's layout, the two waterways that shaped where its streets and squares could actually be laid. Together the Capitol, the President's House, and the two rivers sketch a capital still growing into the ambitious plan drawn up decades earlier for it.

For a Washington, D.C. family with roots in the capital, someone who's settled there more recently, or a collector drawn to the earliest detailed plans of the federal city, this sheet has a specific pull. The store also carries a later 1886 Mitchell plan of Washington elsewhere in the collection; this 1836 Tanner sheet, drawn five decades earlier, captures the capital while it was still a comparatively young, sparsely built-out city organized around the Capitol and President's House rather than the denser, ward-divided city the later plan shows. It's printed unframed and available in a range of sizes to fit whatever wall it's headed for.