Maryland, Virginia, West Virginia & North Carolina Map 1865 Regional Print - Baltimore, Richmond, Wheeling, Raleigh

This map of Maryland, Virginia, West Virginia, and North Carolina was produced by S. Augustus Mitchell Jr. and published in 1865 by E.H. Butler & Co., part of the Philadelphia-printed Mitchell's New Reference Atlas for Colleges, Libraries, Families and Counting Houses, a fifty-five-map atlas that kept pace with the country's own shifting borders as closely as it could. The sheet is hand-colored and engraved with relief shown by hachures, its county boundaries, railways, and rivers rendered in the same clean detail found across the series. It covers the mid-Atlantic South in 1865, the year the war ended at Appomattox in Virginia, and it records West Virginia as its own state for the first time, only two years after its 1863 split from Virginia.

Maryland, a Union border state throughout the war, is shown anchored by Baltimore and the Chesapeake Bay, its rail lines having carried much of the Union's wartime traffic. Virginia occupies the center of the sheet around Richmond, the former Confederate capital, its counties recording the ground fought over for four years. West Virginia appears as a distinct state for the first time on a Mitchell atlas map, its mountainous counties shown around Wheeling, the new state's capital. North Carolina closes the sheet to the south, centered on Raleigh, with its Piedmont and coastal counties both recorded in detail. Together the four states trace the ground where the war both began in earnest and ended.

The war that had convulsed this ground for four years ended at Appomattox, in Virginia, in the very year this sheet was published, a fact that gives it particular weight for anyone with Virginia or Carolina roots tracing ancestors against the Civil War's shifting state lines. Collectors, meanwhile, will note the rare early depiction of West Virginia as a separate state. A Baltimore or Richmond buyer will find it a striking record of two cities that sat on opposite sides of the war's front lines. It is available unframed in a full range of sizes, from a compact study print to a larger piece suited to an office, study, or hallway.