Michigan Map 1841 State Print - Detroit, Grand Rapids, Ann Arbor

Henry S. Tanner, working out of Philadelphia, issued this Michigan sheet in 1841, included in the 1842 edition of his New Universal Atlas, the last he personally published after three decades spent building a reputation as one of America's most trusted cartographers. This printing carries an inset detailing the western part of the state, a level of added coverage the atlas doesn't extend to every sheet, alongside a table of distances laid over Michigan's county divisions. The sheet maps Michigan statewide, four years after its 1837 admission to the Union, a young state whose Lower Peninsula was still filling in even as its Great Lakes shoreline had long anchored its trade.

Lake Superior and Lake Michigan both appear on the sheet, the two Great Lakes bordering the state and giving it the waterway access that shaped its earliest settlement and commerce. The distance table lists how far apart Michigan's towns and cities actually sat, a practical travel layer for a state whose interior roads still lagged behind its lake-shore development. County boundaries are laid out in distinct colors, and the western-portion inset extends the sheet's detail into territory a single map wouldn't otherwise have room to show. Together the lakes, the distances, and the western inset sketch a young state still being filled in around its Great Lakes shoreline.

For a Michigan family with Great Lakes or early-statehood roots, someone who's settled in the state more recently, or a collector building out Michigan's 19th-century maps, this sheet has a specific pull. The store also carries Michigan from Bradford's 1838 atlas, Cram's later 1893 edition, and combined with Wisconsin in Cram's 1883 edition; this 1841 Tanner sheet is the only one of the group to extend into a dedicated western-Michigan inset rather than treating the state as a single undifferentiated sheet. It's printed unframed and available in a range of sizes to fit whatever wall it's headed for.