Connecticut in 1852 - Hartford, New Haven, Litchfield, Norwich

Thomas, Cowperthwait & Co. published this pocket map of Connecticut in 1852, a portable, county-colored edition of the Universal Atlas map folded into dark indigo leather covers with Connecticut population figures and historical notes pasted inside the front cover. Though drawn from Samuel Augustus Mitchell's Universal Atlas sheets, any mention of Mitchell's name was removed from this particular edition, a common practice among rival Philadelphia publishers competing for the lucrative pocket map trade. The map includes two detailed insets of Hartford and New Haven, giving travelers a closer view of the state's two leading cities alongside the full county map. Cowperthwait's edition competed directly with other Philadelphia publishers for the lucrative pocket map trade of the 1850s.

Hartford and New Haven receive their own dedicated insets, underscoring their status as Connecticut's dominant urban centers at mid-century. Litchfield, in the state's hilly northwest, and Norwich, near the mouth of the Thames River in the southeast, mark the broader county structure surrounding these two hubs. The pocket format and its statistical insert reflect a growing market for portable, practical maps aimed at businessmen and travelers rather than atlas collectors, a category distinct from the larger bound atlas sheets more common in this collection. The leather covers themselves, stamped with the state's name in gilt, reflect the care publishers put into even a modest pocket edition.

This 1852 pocket edition offers a more intimate, portable counterpart to the large-format 1879 Rand McNally and 1925 Cram maps of Connecticut also in this collection, all three documenting the state across roughly seventy-five years of change. Its compact, well-traveled format appeals particularly to collectors of American pocket maps or anyone with roots in Hartford or New Haven. This piece ships unframed and is available in multiple sizes. Its compact, well-worn pocket format also makes it a distinctive artifact of how ordinary travelers actually carried maps in the mid-nineteenth century.