Virginia, Maryland and Delaware in 1828 - Richmond, Baltimore, Wilmington

This map of Virginia, Maryland, and Delaware was produced by Henry S. Tanner and published in 1828 in his New Pocket Atlas of the United States with the Roads and Distances, Designed for the Use of Travelers, engraved by J. Knight and issued by Tanner himself in Philadelphia. Tanner was among the leading American cartographers of his generation, and this compact outline-colored sheet, measured against the prime meridian of Washington, D.C., survives only in a handful of copies today; the atlas evidently sold poorly despite years in Tanner's catalogue, making this small travelers' map a genuinely rare survival. It depicts the three mid-Atlantic states two years before America's rapid push westward began in earnest, at a time when roads, distances, and travel between established seaboard cities were still the primary concern of any American atlas aimed at travelers.

Richmond is marked as Virginia's capital, the seat of state government since the Revolutionary era and a hub for the roads radiating across the state. Alexandria appears on the Potomac just south of the federal city, a busy Virginia port town whose trade was closely tied to the growth of Washington itself. Baltimore is recorded as Maryland's principal port and commercial center, already the state's largest city by 1828 and a major stop along the routes traced through the map. Charlestown is also noted among the map's inscribed towns, a smaller Virginia settlement marking the reach of Tanner's road network beyond the major cities. The Chesapeake Bay and Potomac River are both traced across the sheet, the shared waterways that tied Virginia, Maryland, and Delaware's travel routes into a single mid-Atlantic corridor.

This map makes a fitting gift for anyone with family roots in Richmond, Baltimore, Alexandria or the wider Chesapeake mid-Atlantic, or for a collector interested in the rare survival of Tanner's early travelers' atlas. Because so few copies of this pocket atlas survived beyond its original run, this Virginia, Maryland, and Delaware sheet is a genuinely scarce piece of early American travel cartography rather than a common reprint. It is available unframed in a full range of sizes, from a compact study print to a larger statement piece.