Virginia Map 1842 State Print - Richmond, Norfolk, Alexandria

Henry S. Tanner, working out of Philadelphia, issued this Virginia sheet in 1842, included in the final edition of his New Universal Atlas, capping three decades spent building a reputation as one of America's most trusted cartographers. Engraved by W. Brose, this printing carries a profile of the Chesapeake and Ohio Canal, charting its elevation changes in a level of engineering detail few state sheets of the period bothered with, its counties laid out in distinct hand-colored bands. The sheet maps Virginia statewide, in the middle of a canal-building era when the Chesapeake and Ohio was still being pushed westward toward the Ohio River as a direct challenger to Pennsylvania's and New York's own canal and rail corridors.

The Chesapeake and Ohio Canal's elevation profile is the sheet's clear centerpiece, tracking the engineering challenge of lifting canal traffic over Virginia's inland terrain toward the Ohio Valley. Roads and stage-and-steamboat routes are laid over the county divisions, a practical travel layer for a state whose interior remained only partially threaded by the transportation improvements the canal represented. County boundaries are each shaded distinctly, tracing a settlement pattern still concentrated along the coast and the canal's eastern approach. Together the canal profile, the routes, and the county pattern sketch a state investing heavily in infrastructure it had not yet finished building.

For a Virginia family with roots along the canal corridor, someone who's settled in the state more recently, or a collector building out Virginia's mid-19th-century maps, this sheet has a specific pull. The store also carries Virginia from Bradford's standalone 1838 sheet, and combined with West Virginia, Maryland, and Delaware in both Cram's 1893 and 1883 editions; this 1842 Tanner sheet is the only one of the group built around the Chesapeake and Ohio Canal's engineering profile rather than a multi-state regional view. It's printed unframed and available in a range of sizes to fit whatever wall it's headed for.