Wisconsin & Michigan Map 1850 Regional Print - Milwaukee, Madison, Marquette

This detailed map of Wisconsin and large portions of Michigan was issued around 1850 by the Society for the Diffusion of Useful Knowledge, an English organization active from the 1830s through the 1860s that published some of the finest regional maps of North America produced anywhere in Britain during the period, valued for combining careful topographical engraving with genuinely current survey information rather than recycled decades-old geography. This sheet, numbered Sheet V in its series, appeared only two years after Wisconsin's admission to the Union, and it records county boundaries still in a genuinely primitive state, particularly across the western half of the state, where organized government had barely begun to catch up with settlement. The map covers towns, rivers, roads, bridges, lakes, post offices and court houses in dense, methodical detail characteristic of the Society's house style.

Milwaukee anchors Wisconsin's Lake Michigan shore as its largest and fastest-growing city, while Madison, chosen as state capital for its central location rather than its size, sits inland among the state's lake-studded interior. Green Bay marks the historic fur-trading gateway at the mouth of the Fox River, a route that had linked the Great Lakes to the Mississippi since the French colonial era. On the Michigan side of the sheet, Marquette stands on Lake Superior's southern shore, then still a small outpost rather than the mining hub it would become. The Fox and Wisconsin rivers trace the old canoe portage route across the state, while the western counties, some barely more than crude rectangles at this date, testify to how recently formal government had arrived there.

This map suits a gift for a Wisconsin or Michigan family with roots in the old Great Lakes fur trade country, or for a collector drawn to the Society for the Diffusion of Useful Knowledge's distinctive English engraving style applied to American subjects. It offers a very different cartographic voice from the store's American-published Michigan sheets by Tanner, Bradford and Meyer, each aimed at a domestic audience rather than a British one. It is offered unframed in a full range of sizes, from a compact print for a study to a large-format piece for an office or den.