New Jersey Map 1842 State Print - Trenton, Newark, Camden

Henry S. Tanner, working out of Philadelphia, issued this New Jersey sheet in 1842 as part of his New Universal Atlas, the last edition he personally published, reduced from an earlier map by T. Gordon and reworked with Tanner's own reputation for careful surveying and dense transportation detail. Engraved by J. Knight, this printing includes a statistical table of population figures alongside a routes box listing distances out of Trenton, a practical addition aimed as much at travelers as at collectors. The sheet maps New Jersey statewide, a state whose position between New York and Philadelphia made it, by 1842, one of the most heavily crossed corridors in the country even though it remained comparatively modest in population next to its two larger neighbors.

Trenton anchors the map's routes table, its position as state capital reinforced by the distances the map lists radiating outward from it to other towns and cities. New Jersey's counties are each colored distinctly, a standard Tanner convention that here does double duty separating the state's northern, more industrial reaches from its southern, more agricultural ones. The population table adds a demographic layer most state maps of the period skip entirely, giving a snapshot of exactly how New Jersey's roughly 373,000 residents in 1840 were distributed county by county. Together the routes, the counties, and the population figures sketch a state defined as much by the traffic passing through it as by anything happening within its own borders.

For a New Jersey family with Trenton or shore-region roots, or a collector building out the state's mid-19th-century maps, this sheet has a specific pull. The store also carries New Jersey from Cram's later 1893 and 1883 editions, and from Bradford's 1838 atlas; this 1842 Tanner sheet is the only one of the group built around a Trenton routes table and county population data rather than railroad lines or city insets. It's printed unframed and available in a range of sizes to fit whatever wall it's headed for.