Kentucky in 1838 - Frankfort, Louisville, Lexington

This Kentucky sheet appears in Thomas G. Bradford's 1838 An Illustrated Atlas, published by Weeks, Jordan & Co. and Wiley and Putnam. Kentucky by 1838 was a well-established border state whose Bluegrass region had built its economy and reputation around horse breeding and hemp cultivation, the latter grown largely for rope and bagging used to bale cotton on plantations further south — a quiet but direct economic link between Kentucky's fields and the booming cotton economy of the Deep South. George W. Boynton engraved the map at a scale of about 1:1,900,000.

Counties are picked out in pastel hand-applied color across the Bluegrass State's outline, a clean, legible treatment for a state whose settled, prosperous interior already looked markedly different from the raw frontier conditions still found in newer states to its south and west.

Bluegrass State natives and their descendants tend to want this one, someone who's left the state behind but still claims it, or a collector working through Bradford's 1838 series one sheet at a time. The print ships unframed and comes in multiple sizes.