Mississippi Map 1836 State Print - Jackson, Natchez, Vicksburg

Henry S. Tanner, working out of Philadelphia, issued this Mississippi sheet in 1836, 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 known for the accuracy of his surveys. This printing carries a decorative title cartouche and a table of steamboat routes, a practical addition that reflects how thoroughly river travel still dominated movement through the state, its full-color county shading rendered with the same careful hachured relief Tanner used across the atlas. The sheet maps Mississippi statewide, published the same year the state's boundaries had settled into their modern form, still less than two decades removed from its 1817 admission to the Union and still very much defined by the plantation economy taking root along its river frontage.

The steamboat routes table lists distances between Mississippi's river towns, underscoring how much of the state's commerce moved by water rather than road in an era before rail had reached this far south. County boundaries are laid out in distinct colors, each labeled clearly enough to trace how settlement had spread inland from the Mississippi River's banks. Roads connect the scattered towns the map does show, though they remain secondary to the river routes the steamboat table foregrounds. Together the counties, the roads, and the steamboat table sketch a state whose 1836 economy ran almost entirely along its namesake river.

For a Mississippi family with river-town or plantation-era roots, someone who's settled in the state more recently, or a collector building out the state's mid-19th-century maps, this sheet has a specific pull. The store also carries Mississippi from Cram's 1893 edition, from a combined Arkansas-Louisiana-Mississippi sheet in Cram's 1883 edition, and from Bradford's 1838 atlas; this 1836 Tanner sheet is the oldest of the group and the only one built around a dedicated steamboat routes table rather than railroad lines. It's printed unframed and available in a range of sizes, from a compact 16x20 up to a large-format A0, to fit whatever wall it's headed for.