Maine in 1838 - Augusta, Portland, Bangor

This Maine map is drawn from Thomas G. Bradford's 1838 An Illustrated Atlas, published by Weeks, Jordan & Co. and Wiley and Putnam only eighteen years after Maine's admission to the Union as part of the Missouri Compromise, when it separated from Massachusetts. By the time this sheet was printed, Maine's long-disputed northern border with New Brunswick had flared into what would become known as the Aroostook War — a tense, largely bloodless standoff between American and British-Canadian lumbermen and militia over timber rights in the Aroostook Valley that peaked in the winter of 1838-39, the exact period this map was published. Engraved by George W. Boynton at a broad scale of roughly 1:1,584,000, it's one of the more compact-scale sheets in the atlas.

Real attention goes to the coastline, with the Atlantic Ocean's edge picked out in fine detail even as the interior is rendered in the atlas's signature hand-applied county color — the working shipyards and timber ports along that coast were, at the time, the state's economic backbone.

Maine natives and anyone who grew up along the Down East coast tend to gravitate to this one, along with a collector filling in Bradford's 1838 series. It makes a fitting gift for someone who's traded Maine winters for somewhere warmer but still calls it home. Unframed, available in multiple sizes.