Iowa in 1856 - Iowa City, Dubuque, Burlington

Charles Morse published this scarce pre-Civil War map of Iowa in New York in 1856, part of his General Atlas of the World and a genuinely original production rather than the simple updated reissue found in most of the atlas's other state maps. Unlike the bulk of Charles Morse's atlas, which largely recycled plates from Morse & Breese's earlier 1845 North American Atlas, this Iowa sheet entirely replaced the older combined Iowa and Wisconsin map from that prior edition, reflecting how dramatically Iowa's own separate statehood, achieved in 1846, and subsequent rapid settlement had outgrown its earlier shared territorial treatment.

The map is colored by county and township and shows towns, roads, mountains, rivers, railroads, and lakes across a state still in the early stages of its railroad development, with this particular example notably overprinted to indicate both operating and proposed rail lines, a rare and useful feature for tracking the state's transportation ambitions at this early date. The map also predates the extension of formal township surveys into Iowa's western counties, capturing the state at a genuine mid-point in its settlement progress. Iowa City, the state capital until 1857, anchors the map's center, Dubuque continues as the state's oldest and most established river town on the upper Mississippi, and Burlington marks another key Mississippi River port that had served as Iowa's first territorial capital in the 1830s.

This map is a fitting gift for a family with Iowa roots, for a transplant now settled along the Mississippi River, or for a collector of Charles Morse's scarce original 1856 state maps. It is offered unframed in a range of sizes.