1846 Mitchell Map of Washington D.C. w/Georgetown

This is S. Augustus Mitchell's 1846 city map of Washington D.C. Given that most of Washington D.C. was under construction when this map was drawn, Mitchell's plan is a remarkable combination of existing urbanization and projections - nearby Georgetown, also included here, was much more developed.

A Closer Look

Though Pierre Charles L'Enfant's brilliant plan for the national capital is evident in the grid and ray layout, and many of the great national monuments are identified, the reality of the national capital was that even in 1846, more nearly 50 years after the city's construction began, Washington D.C. remained little more than a ragtag cluster of neo-Grecian monuments surrounded by dense forest. Anthony Trollope, an English novelist, remarked on the city's barrenness,

There is a map of Washington accurately laid down; and taking that map with him in his journeying a man may lose himself in the streets, not as one loses himself in London between Shoreditch and Russell Square, but as one does so in the deserts of the Holy Land, between Emmaus and Arimathea. In the first place there, no one knows where the places are or is sure of their existence, and then, between their presumed localities, the country is wild, trackless, unbridged, uninhabited, and desolate… If you are a sportsman, you will desire to shoot snipe within sight of the President's House.

Nonetheless, a city was emerging, with rail lines, bridges, parks, and city wards surveyed and laid down for the construction teams. The Capitol Building, the floor plan of which appears in the upper right, was one of the first buildings in Washington to be completed and was functional by about 1846, though, admittedly, a very different building than we know today. A further list of extant and proposed monuments and government buildings, along with their wards and numerical identifiers, appears in the lower left.

The map features the Cary and Hart borders, which were replaced in 1847-48 with new Mitchell borders.

Publication History and Census

This map was published in 1846 in the first edition of Samuel Augustus Mitchell's New Universal Atlas. The map is based on the work of Henry S. Tanner, c. 1836, which Mitchell acquired from Carey and Hart in 1846, who had acquired them from Tanner in 1843. Importantly, in the course of changing hands, the atlas was converted from engraved steel or copper plates to lithographic stones. Mitchell issued the atlas in early 1846 with Tanner's name still on the maps.