Southern New England Map 1836 Regional Print - Boston, Providence, Hartford, New Haven

David Hugh Burr published this map of Connecticut, Rhode Island and Massachusetts in New York in 1836, part of an atlas widely regarded as the most elegant American commercially published atlas of its era, prized for its wash coloring and refined engraving style. Burr had trained as a surveyor under Simeon DeWitt in New York before producing his first atlas, of New York State, in 1829, the second state atlas ever issued in the United States. Through the early 1830s he served as topographer for the US Post Office, a position that gave him direct access to the most current survey data available anywhere in the country, and he would go on to serve as Geographer of the House of Representatives later in the decade. This sheet reflects that official access, mapping all three southern New England states together at a scale generous enough to record their county divisions in fine detail.

Boston anchors Massachusetts as its capital and chief port, while Providence performs the same role for Rhode Island on Narragansett Bay, and Hartford governs Connecticut from the banks of the Connecticut River. Worcester and Springfield mark Massachusetts's principal inland centers, and New Bedford appears as a growing whaling port on the state's southern coast. The county configurations Burr recorded here have, notably, changed remarkably little in the nearly two centuries since, a rare case of a mid-1830s map still reading as a recognizable outline of the modern map of southern New England. Cape Cod and the Berkshire hills bracket Massachusetts at either end of the sheet.

This tri-state map is a fitting gift for a New England family with roots scattered across Massachusetts, Rhode Island and Connecticut alike, or for a collector drawn to Burr's celebrated wash-colored engraving style. It sits between the store's other regional sheets chronologically, later than Payne's plainer 1799 Massachusetts map and earlier than Colton's 1859 Massachusetts and Rhode Island edition, giving a buyer three distinct snapshots of the same corner of New England across six decades. It is offered unframed in a full range of sizes, from a compact desk print to a large-format piece for a study or hallway.