Louisiana in 1838 - New Orleans, Baton Rouge, Shreveport

Louisiana's map in Thomas G. Bradford's 1838 An Illustrated Atlas, published by Weeks, Jordan & Co. and Wiley and Putnam, arrives thirty-five years after the Louisiana Purchase brought the territory into the United States. By 1838, New Orleans had grown into one of the busiest ports in the country, its wealth built on cotton and sugar shipped down the Mississippi from plantations across the Deep South, and its distinct Creole culture — a blend of French, Spanish, and Caribbean influence, governed under a civil-law tradition unlike any other state — set it apart from its English-common-law neighbors. George W. Boynton engraved the sheet at a scale of roughly 1:1,700,000.

The Mississippi River winds through the map on its way to the Gulf of Mexico, with the state's parishes — Louisiana's distinctive county-equivalent divisions inherited from its French and Spanish colonial past — hand-colored throughout.

This sheet is a fitting gift for a Louisiana family, a New Orleanian who's moved on but never really left, or a collector building a full set of Bradford's 1838 state maps. The print is unframed and available in a range of sizes.