Kentucky in 1814 - Frankfort, Lexington, Danville

Mathew Carey published this map of Kentucky from Philadelphia in 1814, updating an earlier state of the map that had shown only the undivided Northwestern Territory to the north — this later issue instead names Ohio, Indiana, and Illinois individually, tracking Congress's creation of those territories and states in the years just before. Carey's firm, built from his 1794 General Atlas for the Present War and his landmark 1795 American Atlas, held the distinction of publishing the earliest general atlas of the United States, and by 1814 his shop was the largest publishing house in the country. The map divides Kentucky by county and reflects the engraving standards Carey's stable of Philadelphia engravers had established over two decades in the trade. It records Kentucky roughly two decades after statehood, a period when the state's population and county count were both still expanding rapidly westward from its original Bluegrass core.

Frankfort holds its position as the state capital, chosen in 1792 for its central location on the Kentucky River between the state's eastern and western settlements. Lexington remains the commercial and cultural hub of the Bluegrass region to its east, already known by this date as the "Athens of the West" for its early colleges and print trade. Danville, further south, carried particular political weight as the town where Kentucky's ten statehood conventions had been held in the 1780s and early 1790s, the effective birthplace of the state's constitution. The map's northward reference to the newly individuated territories of Ohio, Indiana, and Illinois underscores how recently the entire Northwest had gone from a single unorganized block to a set of distinct, separately named jurisdictions.

This early 1814 Carey edition suits a Kentucky family tracing roots back to the state's first decades, a Danville or Frankfort transplant with ties to its founding-era history, or a collector drawn to Carey's place at the head of American atlas publishing. It is the earliest of the four Kentucky maps carried in this store, predating Bradford's 1835 edition, Tanner's 1833 map, and Meyer's 1845 German edition by two decades or more, and it is the only one of the group to record the moment Ohio, Indiana, and Illinois were first mapped as separate jurisdictions rather than a single undivided territory. It ships unframed and is available in a full range of sizes.