27. S. A. Mitchell and J. H. Young. “Mitchell’s Reference & Distance Map of the United States by J. H. Young” (Philadelphia: Mitchell & Hinman, 1834). First edition, with the 1834 printed date, and without counties individually colored. Steel engraving with exquisite bright original hand color, sectioned and mounted on cartographic linen. The outer two sections are reinforced with original marbled boards, which double as protective covers. Original green cloth selvage decorates the edges. Overall size: 53 3/4 x 68 1/4". Scale: 1 inch = 25 miles. Insets of ten important U. S. cities and their environs, as well as three other miniature maps: “North Part of Maine,” “South Part of Florida,” and “General Map of the United States with the contiguous British & Mexican Possessions.” Ornate title cartouche of a delicately engraved coastal view dominated by the American eagle perched on a seashell. Lovely acanthus-leaf and shell border. Cloth selvage is loose in some places; one minor split at a fold. Overall, fine original condition, exceptionally high-quality original color with heavy gum arabic at the state borders for a luminous effect, and exceedingly fine condition of the paper and the mount.

Price: $22,000. [ ]

Mitchell and Young’s grand case map of the new nation is an eloquent and beautiful testament to the era when the entire United States seemed to be moving westward. Extremely detailed and large in scale, showing every county, township, parish, and hundreds of towns based on the 1830 census, along with all the major nineteenth-century traveler’s routes—steamboats, railroads, canal routes, and roads. It is difficult to imagine a more useful picture of the nation or a more persuasive impetus to head west. An extremely popular map, the piece was compiled from the latest sources and designed to fulfill a general demand for information regardless of regional focus, using the exquisitely precise new medium of steel engraving that proved so successful on the company’s 1831 folding map of the United States. Nebenzahl underscores the importance of this fascinating piece of Americana in his 1978 description of the 1835 second edition, which he calls a “very decorative map of the United States that demonstrated the rapid national expansion and regional conflicts of the Jacksonian era. The nascent railroad system is shown challenging the highly developed canal network. . . .” Of interest to the collector of Texas maps and Western Americana, the large inset of the United States features Texas in the Arrowsmith configuration, with “Austin’s Colony” shown prominently. This demonstrates the kind of care taken by the publishers to fulfill the wanderlust of early-nineteenth-century Americans and to further the dream of a transcontinental United States. A wonderful example of this important and beautiful document of American settlement history.

Refs: Clark, Travels in the Old South, vol. III, no. 72; Howes M684; Nebenzahl, Compass, 39, no. 35; Phillips, Maps, p. 888; Ristow, American Maps and Mapmakers, pp. 309–310.

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