Georgia and Alabama in 1823 - Milledgeville, Savannah, Huntsville

Henry Schenck Tanner engraved this large-format map of Georgia and Alabama in 1823, representing the first state of the plate and one of the last sheets completed for his ambitious American Atlas, a project Tanner had begun in 1818 and released in five folios between 1819 and 1823 that is still widely regarded as the single most beautiful large-scale American atlas ever published. The scale of the undertaking was significant enough that it caused Tanner's split from his former partners Kearney and Vallance, a professional cost that nonetheless produced what many consider the finest American atlas of its era. This particular sheet captures the newly formed Alabama Territory, organized only a few years earlier, at a moment when its landscape and administration were still being actively defined even as neighboring Georgia's own institutions had already matured considerably further.

Vast Creek and Cherokee Indian lands dominate the western part of Georgia and the eastern part of Alabama on the map, a striking visual reminder of how much of the two states' combined territory remained under Native American control in the early 1820s. The southern counties of Georgia are depicted as still primitive and thinly settled, while early township surveys appear scattered across Alabama, evidence of the formal land subdivision process just beginning to take hold in the new territory. Towns, villages, mills, forts, battle grounds, iron works, places of worship, and public houses are all marked in remarkable detail across both states, alongside roads, ferries, and waterfalls, a level of specificity that reflects the exceptional quality of engraving Tanner's American Atlas was celebrated for even among contemporary critics.

This map is a fitting gift for a Georgia or Alabama family with roots in either state's earliest settlement years, someone researching ancestors connected to the region's early mills, forts, or churches specifically, or a collector seeking one of the true masterworks of early American atlas engraving. The Vault also carries Alabama alone as mapped by Finley in 1828 and Bradford in 1846, and the wider Southeast as mapped by Rogers and Johnston in 1857; this 1823 Tanner sheet is the earliest of the group and the only one to pair Georgia and Alabama together on a single large-format plate. It's available unframed in a full range of sizes, from a compact study print to a larger statement piece.