Missouri Map 1841 State Print - St. Louis, Jefferson City, Springfield

Henry S. Tanner, working out of Philadelphia, issued this Missouri 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 ornate title cartouche and a table of distances between the state's towns, a practical layer set over county divisions shaded in Tanner's characteristic pastel hand-coloring. The sheet maps Missouri statewide, twenty years after its 1821 admission to the Union, a former frontier gateway state whose river towns had grown into established points of departure for travelers and traders heading further west.

The Missouri and Mississippi Rivers are both named directly on the sheet, the two waterways whose confluence gave the state its outsized role in westward trade and travel. The distance table lists how far apart Missouri's towns actually sat, a practical tool for the settlers and merchants using the state as a launching point into the territories beyond. County boundaries are laid out in distinct colors across the map, tracing a settlement pattern still weighted toward the river corridors even as the state's interior slowly filled in. Together the rivers, the distances, and the counties sketch a state whose 1841 identity was inseparable from its position as a gateway west.

For a Missouri family with river-town or gateway-era roots, someone who's settled in the state more recently, or a collector building out Missouri's 19th-century maps, this sheet has a specific pull. The store also carries Missouri from Bradford's 1838 atlas, Cram's later 1893 and 1883 editions, and Asher & Adams' 1874 railroad-focused atlas; this 1841 Tanner sheet sits chronologically just after Bradford and ahead of the later rail-era editions, built around a table of road and stage distances rather than either antebellum county detail or the railroad network the later sheets track. It's printed unframed and available in a range of sizes to fit whatever wall it's headed for.