Louisiana in 1879 - New Orleans, Baton Rouge, Houma

Thomas Sydenham Hardee, a New Orleans civil engineer, engraved and published this topographical map of Louisiana around 1879 for an unusual purpose: illustrating Dr. Joseph Jones' Medical and Surgical Memoirs, a multi-volume study investigating the geographic distribution and causes of disease across the state. Rather than the roads-and-railroads emphasis of a typical commercial atlas map, Hardee's sheet is printed in five distinct colors representing the different land and vegetation zones of Louisiana, a classification scheme built specifically to support Jones' medical-geographic argument about how terrain and climate shaped disease patterns. The map also records the population of every parish, data drawn from period census figures and laid directly onto the topographical base. It captures Louisiana just over a decade after the Civil War, when public health researchers were increasingly turning to mapped data to study epidemic disease across the Gulf South.

New Orleans, shown with its parish population figures prominently marked, was by far the most populous point on the map and the focus of much of Jones' epidemiological concern given the city's recurring outbreaks of yellow fever. Baton Rouge appears within the same population-and-terrain framework as the state capital, its numbers modest compared to the city downriver. Houma, in the marshy Terrebonne parish country southwest of New Orleans, sits within one of the map's distinct vegetation zones, the low wetland terrain that Hardee's five-color scheme was specifically designed to distinguish from the higher, drier ground elsewhere in the state. The map's unusual color coding by land type rather than by parish boundary makes it a genuinely different kind of document from every other Louisiana sheet in this collection.

This scarce 1879 Hardee map is a distinctive gift for a Louisiana family interested in the state's medical or public-health history, a New Orleans transplant, or a collector drawn to thematic maps outside the usual roads-and-railroads commercial format. Unlike the six other Louisiana editions in this store, all general-purpose parish and township maps from Gray, Colton, Morse, Burr, Meyer, and Rand McNally, this sheet was built to illustrate a medical research volume, and its five-color vegetation scheme has no equivalent among the others. It is available unframed in a full range of sizes.