Vermont in 1838 - Montpelier, Burlington, Rutland

This Vermont sheet belongs to Thomas G. Bradford's 1838 An Illustrated Atlas, published by Weeks, Jordan & Co. and Wiley and Putnam and generally regarded as Bradford's most accomplished atlas. Vermont in 1838 was still a largely agrarian, sparsely settled state working through the tail end of the Merino sheep boom of the 1820s and early 1830s, when wool prices had briefly turned hillside farms across the Green Mountains into profitable sheep pasture before prices collapsed and many farmers began drifting west in search of better land — a quiet demographic shift that would only accelerate in the decades that followed. Engraved by George W. Boynton at a scale of roughly 1:792,000, the map is bordered with a simple double-line border and the state name set in bold type at the bottom.

County boundaries are hand-painted in the atlas's signature outline color, giving the Green Mountain State's political geography a clean, legible layout — a modest, unhurried treatment that fits a state whose landscape was still defined more by hill farms and small towns than by the industrial growth reshaping its neighbors to the south.

Vermont expats tend to reach for this one, along with anyone whose family worked hill-country farmland before the westward drift of the mid-1800s thinned out the state's rural population. It also suits a collector rounding out a set of Bradford's 1838 state maps. Ships unframed, in multiple sizes.