Ohio Map 1845 State Print - Columbus, Cincinnati, Cleveland

Sidney Morse and Samuel Breese, working in New York, published this map of Ohio in 1845 as part of Morse's North American Atlas, issued by Harper & Brothers across nine illustrated parts sold for twenty-five cents apiece. Morse and Breese pioneered the cerographic wax-engraving process used to print the map, a technique cheaper than copper-plate engraving that let Harper's price the atlas within reach of ordinary households, and this sheet marks Ohio's borders with Michigan, Indiana, Kentucky, Virginia, and Pennsylvania alongside its Lake Erie shoreline. Ohio is shown here as one of the most developed states west of the Appalachians, its canal system largely complete and its earliest railroads only beginning to appear alongside a canal system still very much in daily use.

Columbus anchors the map as the state capital, a town built specifically for that purpose in the state's geographic center rather than grown from any prior settlement. The Ohio and Erie Canal and the Miami and Erie Canal both cross the state, the two waterways that had carried most of Ohio's trade to the Great Lakes and the Ohio River in the two decades before this map was drawn. Roads and the state's first rail lines radiate from the major towns, still a minor supplement to the canal network shown so prominently here. Together the capital and the two canals sketch a state whose prosperity, at this date, still rested squarely on water transport rather than rail.

An Ohio family with roots in the old canal towns will find this sheet catches that era directly, and it suits a collector marking the state just before the railroads overtook the canals as its dominant transportation network. The store also carries Ohio from Cram's later 1893, 1883, and 1884 editions, each drawn after rail had eclipsed the canal system this 1845 sheet shows in full operation; this Morse map is the earliest Ohio sheet in the collection. It's printed unframed and available in a range of sizes to fit whatever wall it's headed for.