1881 Atlas Map of the Ohio River from Pittsburgh to Cairo, Illinois

This facsimile reproduces the Map of the Ohio River, an exhaustive cartographic survey of the Ohio River from Pittsburgh to Cairo, Illinois, prepared by the United States Army Corps of Engineers under the direction of Major William E. Merrill, drawn by C. Moser, and published in 1881. The work consolidates and refines decades of federal river surveys, drawing on the 1837–38 work of Lieutenant Sanders, the 1844 surveys of C.A. Fuller, the 1867–68 surveys of W.M. Roberts, and additions and corrections from later expeditions. The result is what is generally regarded as the most comprehensive and detailed survey of the Ohio River produced in the nineteenth century — a working reference for the engineers, river pilots, and commercial interests who depended on the Ohio as the principal commercial artery of the central United States during the steamboat and early railroad era. Major Merrill is the same officer whose name appears on the Warren–Freyhold Map of the United States and the Map of Kansas, Texas and Indian Territory, both issued in 1867.

Summary of Contents

The atlas presents 52 highly detailed uncolored maps on 40 sheets, accompanied by 2 index sheets that key each individual plate to its location along the river's course. Together the plates document the full length of the Ohio from its origins at the confluence of the Allegheny and Monongahela rivers at Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, downstream through West Virginia, Ohio, Kentucky, Indiana, and Illinois to its mouth at Cairo, where it joins the Mississippi. Each sheet records channel depths and navigational features, islands and sandbars, river bends and shoals, locks and dams, wharves and landings, riverside towns and settlements, tributary streams, railroad crossings and bridges, and adjacent topographic detail with the precision required by a federal engineering survey.

An essential reference for historians of nineteenth-century American river commerce and inland navigation, researchers of Army Corps of Engineers history and federal infrastructure development, genealogists tracing families along the Ohio River corridor, and collectors of antiquarian American cartography.

82 pages. 8.5" x 11".

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