Mississippi & Louisiana Map 1857 Regional Print - Jackson, New Orleans, Natchez

Henry Darwin Rogers and Alexander Keith Johnston issued this States of Mississippi and Louisiana sheet in 1857, published in London by Edward Stanford and engraved by W. & A.K. Johnston of Edinburgh, part of their Atlas of the United States. This printing shows both states and their counties in outline color, drawn during the height of the antebellum cotton economy, four years before secession would upend the region. The sheet maps Mississippi and Louisiana jointly, showing the counties and parishes that organized the lower Mississippi Valley's plantation economy.

County boundaries in Mississippi and Louisiana's distinct parish system are both marked across the sheet, a difference in local administrative structure the map captures directly. The Mississippi River runs the length of the sheet, the dominant waterway tying both states together and the primary route for cotton and other goods moving toward New Orleans and the Gulf. Settlement in 1857 concentrated heavily along the river and its tributaries, the fertile bottomland that anchored the region's plantation economy. Together the counties and parishes, the Mississippi River, and the river-corridor settlement sketch two states at the economic peak of the antebellum cotton era.

For a Mississippi or Louisiana family with antebellum roots, or a collector drawn to this British-published perspective on the pre-Civil War South, this sheet has a specific pull. The store also carries these two states combined with Arkansas in Mitchell's later 1884 sheet elsewhere in this collection, and separately from Cram's 1893 and 1883 editions and Bradford's 1838 atlas; this 1857 Rogers and Johnston sheet is the only one in the store to pair Mississippi and Louisiana alone, at the height of the antebellum cotton economy. It's printed unframed and available in a range of sizes to fit whatever wall it's headed for.