New York in 1839 - New York City, Queens, Albany

David H. Burr, one of the most prolific American cartographers of the early nineteenth century, drew this pocket map of the State of New York and its surrounding country, republished in 1839 by Stone & Clark of Ithaca from plates Burr had originally entered a decade earlier in 1829. The pocket set actually bundles two separate maps mounted back to back inside dark green leather covers stamped "State of N.Y.", pairing the statewide view with a companion sheet devoted specifically to the counties of New York, Queens, Kings, and Richmond, the core counties that would eventually form New York City itself. Engraved by the Albany and New York firms of Rawdon, Clark & Co. and Rawdon, Wright & Co., the maps use Washington, D.C., as their prime meridian, a common choice on American maps of the period asserting cartographic independence from British conventions. By 1839, New York State was in the midst of the transformation the Erie Canal had unleashed a decade earlier, its trade and population both expanding rapidly along the new water route connecting the Great Lakes to the Hudson.

New York, Queens, Kings, and Richmond counties are each distinctly colored and labeled on the companion sheet, the four counties that together comprised the city and its immediate surroundings before the far larger five-borough consolidation of 1898. Roads and post offices are marked throughout the statewide map, a network that had grown considerably denser as the Erie Canal drove settlement and commerce across the state through the 1820s and 1830s. Rivers and bays are carefully delineated, essential geographic detail for travelers and businessmen navigating a state whose economy increasingly depended on water transport. The scale of roughly one to 1.2 million on the statewide sheet balances broad coverage with genuine navigational usefulness, exactly what a folding pocket map needed to accomplish for a traveling businessman of the era.

This pocket map is a fitting gift for a New York family with roots stretching back to the Erie Canal era, someone researching ancestors who once lived in the four founding counties of what became New York City, or a collector drawn to early American pocket maps specifically. It stands alone among the Vault's statewide New York offerings, distinguished by its companion county sheet and its unusually early date, predating every other New York area map in the collection by more than two decades. It's available unframed in a full range of sizes, from a compact study print to a larger statement piece.