New York, New Jersey, Pennsylvania & Delaware Map 1858 Regional Print - New York City, Philadelphia, Trenton, Dover

This map of New York, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, and Delaware was drawn by G.W. Colton with text by Richard Swainson Fisher and published in 1858 in Colton's Illustrated Cabinet Atlas and Descriptive Geography, a compact New York atlas. Fisher's accompanying text ran to hundreds of pages of statistics and description, but the engraving itself stayed uncluttered, favoring legible county outlines over the dense hachuring found in Colton's larger wall maps. The sheet renders relief in hachures, colors each state's counties individually within an ornamental floral border, and includes separate insets detailing the vicinities of Philadelphia and New York City, all engraved by Davies and Roberts and George Russell and Co. Published at a moment of rapid industrial and rail expansion, the map captures the northeastern seaboard as it was consolidating into the country's dominant commercial and manufacturing region in the years before the Civil War.

New York is shown with its namesake city given a detailed inset, already the country's largest port and financial center, with Albany further upriver serving as the state capital along the Hudson River. New Jersey sits between New York and Philadelphia, its small size belied by its position along the busiest travel corridor in the country and its dense manufacturing towns near Trenton. Pennsylvania is anchored by Philadelphia, likewise given its own inset here as a major manufacturing and shipping center on the Delaware River. Delaware, the smallest of the four states, appears compactly mapped along the west bank of the Delaware Bay, its capital at Dover set well apart from the busier ports to its north.

New York and Philadelphia transplants, along with anyone whose family history runs through the mid-Atlantic corridor, will recognize plenty here, and so will a collector working through Colton's 1858 atlas one northeastern state at a time. Those two insets of Philadelphia and New York alone are worth seeking out for anyone researching either city's mid-nineteenth-century street plan. It is available unframed in a full range of sizes, from a compact study print to a larger statement piece.