Mississippi in 1838 - Jackson, Natchez, Vicksburg

This Mississippi sheet comes from Thomas G. Bradford's 1838 An Illustrated Atlas, published by Weeks, Jordan & Co. and Wiley and Putnam, printed twenty-one years after Mississippi's admission to the Union. The state was in the middle of a rapid cotton-driven land rush in this period, fueled directly by the forced removal of the Choctaw and Chickasaw nations under treaties signed earlier that decade, which opened millions of acres of fertile land to incoming planters almost overnight. Unlike most of the atlas's maps, which George W. Boynton engraved, this map was engraved by the firm of S. Stiles, Sherman & Smith, at a scale of about 1:1,600,000.

County boundaries are picked out in the atlas's hand-applied color across the state's compact outline — a political map redrawn again and again through the 1830s as newly opened land was carved into counties almost as fast as settlers could claim it.

This one suits a Mississippi family, someone who's carried Magnolia State roots to a new home, or a collector rounding out Bradford's 1838 series. The print ships unframed and comes in multiple sizes.