Illinois, Missouri & Arkansas Map 1857 Regional Print - Chicago, St. Louis, Little Rock

Henry Darwin Rogers and Alexander Keith Johnston issued this States of Illinois, Missouri, and Arkansas sheet in 1857, published in London by Edward Stanford and engraved by W. & A.K. Johnston of Edinburgh, part of their Atlas of the United States. This printing shows all three states in printed outline color with counties marked in blue, at a scale of roughly 54.5 miles to the inch. The sheet maps Illinois, Missouri, and Arkansas jointly, a stretch of the country running from the Great Lakes down to the edge of the Deep South.

County boundaries are marked in blue across all three states, an administrative layer reflecting settlement patterns still concentrated toward each state's eastern or river-adjacent counties in the mid-1850s. The Mississippi River runs the length of the sheet, the dominant waterway tying Illinois, Missouri, and Arkansas together and still the primary route for goods moving between the upper Midwest and the Gulf. Major cities and towns are marked along the river and inland, tracing the region's earliest and densest settlement corridors. Together the counties, the Mississippi, and the settlement pattern sketch three states whose growth in 1857 still hugged the river far more than their western interiors.

For an Illinois, Missouri, or Arkansas family with mid-19th-century roots, or a collector drawn to this British-published perspective on the pre-Civil War Midwest and South, this sheet has a specific pull. The store also carries all three states individually from Cram's 1893 and 1883 editions, Bradford's 1838 atlas, Asher & Adams' 1874 atlas, and Tanner's earlier sheets; this 1857 Rogers and Johnston sheet is the only one in the store to combine Illinois, Missouri, and Arkansas on a single map. It's printed unframed and available in a range of sizes to fit whatever wall it's headed for.