Washington, D.C. in 1863 - Georgetown, Capitol Hill, Uniontown

Samuel Augustus Mitchell Jr. of Philadelphia issued this plan of the City of Washington in 1863, part of the New General Atlas he had launched in 1860 after purchasing his father's former business from Charles DeSilver. The map is hand colored by municipal ward rather than by the decorative monument insets favored by rival publishers, framed instead within an elaborate grapevine border that Mitchell's firm used across several of its finest city plans of the period. It captures the capital in 1863, the year of the Emancipation Proclamation, when Washington's prewar population had roughly doubled under the pressure of war administration, military encampments, and the thousands of formerly enslaved people who had begun arriving in the city seeking freedom and work.

Georgetown anchors the map's western edge along the Potomac, its older streets and wharves distinct from the federal city's more formal grid. Capitol Hill, organized here as its own numbered ward, centers on the Capitol building itself, still under construction during the war years shown. The Long Bridge, spanning the Potomac toward Virginia, appears as one of the capital's most strategically vital crossings, heavily guarded throughout the war to protect the approach to the city. A second bridge leads to Uniontown, the new settlement rising across the Anacostia River in the city's southeast, a rapidly growing streetcar suburb platted only a few years earlier. Streets, public buildings, and ward boundaries are traced in careful detail across the whole sheet.

This map is well suited to a Washington, D.C. family, a Georgetown or Capitol Hill transplant, or a Civil War history collector. The store also carries Alvin Jewett Johnson's 1862 map of Georgetown and Washington, decorated with monument insets rather than Mitchell's ward-by-ward coloring; together the two sheets let a collector compare how two rival firms mapped the wartime capital within a single year of each other. It is available unframed in a range of sizes.