Missouri in 1838 - Jefferson City, St. Louis, Springfield

This Missouri sheet is part of Thomas G. Bradford's 1838 An Illustrated Atlas, published by Weeks, Jordan & Co. and Wiley and Putnam, printed seventeen years after Missouri gained statehood under the Missouri Compromise. 1838 was also the year of the Missouri Mormon War, a violent conflict between Missouri militia and Latter Day Saint settlers that culminated that October in the state-sanctioned "Extermination Order" forcing thousands of Mormons to flee the state — one of the darker chapters in Missouri's early statehood, unfolding the same year this map went to print. Engraved by George W. Boynton at a scale of roughly 1:1,800,000.

Counties, towns, rivers, and hills are all laid out across the map in the atlas's characteristic hand-applied color, a detailed treatment for a state that, as the western gateway via St. Louis, was already becoming the jumping-off point for settlers and traders heading further west.

Missouri expats and lifelong residents alike tend to reach for this one, someone who's carried Show-Me State roots to a new home, or a collector rounding out Bradford's 1838 series. Sold unframed, it comes in multiple sizes.