North and South Carolina in 1842 - Raleigh, Charlotte, Columbia

Jeremiah Greenleaf of Brattleboro, Vermont published this map of North and South Carolina in 1842 for his New Universal Atlas, a work built directly on plates he had acquired around 1840 from David H. Burr, whose earlier Universal Atlas was widely regarded as the most elegantly engraved American commercial atlas of its era. This is a rare late state of the map, hand colored by county, a treatment absent from Greenleaf's earlier printings of the same plate, and it records courthouses individually alongside the usual towns, rivers, and roads. By 1842 both Carolinas had completed the forced removal of the Cherokee and other Indian nations from their western counties, and the cotton economy first established along the coastal lowlands had pushed steadily into the Piedmont upcountry, reshaping county lines on both sides of the state border the map straddles.

Raleigh, planned from scratch in 1792 as North Carolina's capital, sits inland in the north-central part of the sheet, deliberately sited away from any existing town. Charlotte, in the state's southern Piedmont, appears as a growing market town near the site of an early gold rush that had briefly made the region the nation's leading gold producer before the California strikes eclipsed it. Columbia, South Carolina's capital at the falls of the Congaree, anchors the map's southern half. Courthouses mark the seat of each county on both sides of the state line, while the Catawba, Pee Dee, and Santee Rivers trace the drainage systems that carried cotton from the Piedmont down toward the coastal ports.

This map suits a Carolinas family with ties on either side of the state line, a Charlotte or Columbia transplant, or a collector tracing the Piedmont gold and cotton booms of the 1840s. The store also carries Anthony Finley's 1831 map of South Carolina alone; that earlier single-state sheet predates the county subdivisions and hand coloring seen here, while this Greenleaf edition offers a full decade's further development across both states at once. It is available unframed in a range of sizes.