Missouri Map 1839 State Print - St. Louis, Jefferson City, Independence

Henry Schenck Tanner engraved this map of Missouri in 1839 for his New Universal Atlas, a more compact and accessible successor to his earlier monumental New American Atlas that had become one of the most trusted cartographic reference works of the Jacksonian era. Tanner continually revised his plates to track legislative and survey changes, and this issue captures Missouri hand-colored by county with towns, rivers, lakes, roads and railroads recorded in careful detail, alongside a table of steamboat routes and distances reflecting how central river transport remained to the state's economy. The map records a state still organizing its southern reaches into workable counties, several of them, including Barry, Taney, Ripley and Pulaski, drawn here at an oversized scale that would later be subdivided as population filled in behind the original survey lines.

St. Louis anchors the map as Missouri's dominant river port at the confluence of the Mississippi and Missouri rivers, while Jefferson City, chosen for its central position on the Missouri River, continues to serve as the state capital. St. Joseph appears on the state's western edge, close by the Bounty Lands set aside across Chariton and Carroll counties to reward veterans of the War of 1812, and near the recently completed "Addition of 1836," the tract added to Missouri's northwestern boundary along the Missouri River. The Ozark highlands dominate the map's southern reaches, still organized into the outsized counties that had not yet been broken into smaller, more manageable jurisdictions.

This map suits a gift for a Missouri family with roots in the state's early river towns, or for a collector assembling Tanner's New Universal Atlas plates state by state. The store also carries Tanner's 1836 Missouri sheet, issued just three years earlier and focused specifically on the Platte Purchase controversy; together the two editions trace Missouri's rapid northwestward expansion across a single turbulent decade. It is offered unframed in a full range of sizes, from a compact print for a study to a large-format piece for an office or den.