Massachusetts & Rhode Island Map 1859 Regional Print - Boston, Providence, Newport

Joseph Hutchins Colton's map of Massachusetts and Rhode Island was reissued in New York around 1859 during the short-lived partnership of Johnson & Browning, who had acquired Colton's steel plates and reprinted them under their own credit while retaining Colton's original 1855 copyright and his ornate scroll border. Colton's firm had grown, since its founding in 1831, into one of the primary American publishers of guidebooks, railroad maps and atlases, prized for high-quality steel-plate engraving paired with hand-applied watercolor. This transitional issue precedes Johnson's fully revised atlas of 1863 and is finished with wash-tinted counties beneath a bold carmine state outline. It captures New England at a mature mid-century moment, with rail and steamer networks now knitting the region's cities and coastal towns into a single commercial system rather than a loose scatter of separate ports.

Boston is shown with its own detailed inset of the "Vicinity of Boston," keeping Cambridge, Charlestown, Roxbury and Dorchester as independent towns not yet absorbed into the city, with harbor islands and forts individually named. Providence and Newport anchor the enlarged Rhode Island panel, their coastal detail running from Pawtucket down to Little Compton, with bridges and ferries carefully recorded along Narragansett Bay. Worcester and Springfield mark the inland rail corridor threading up the Connecticut Valley, part of the network of lines the map's key distinguishes from common roads and canals. At the state's western edge, "Boston Corner" is labeled, the small Massachusetts gore ceded to New York in 1855, a boundary curiosity mapmakers of the period liked to preserve.

This map suits a gift for a Massachusetts or Rhode Island family with roots in Boston, Providence or the old mill towns of the Blackstone Valley, or for a collector tracing how Colton's plates were recycled and relabeled by successive New York publishers. The store's other Massachusetts maps, including Payne's 1799 state map and Burr's 1836 tri-state edition, show the same ground decades earlier, before the railroads and Boston suburbs recorded here had taken shape. It is offered unframed and available in a full range of sizes, from a compact study print to a large-format piece for an office or living room wall.