Statistics of South Carolina Including a View of its Natural, Civil, and Military History General and Particular

Charleston: Published by Hurlbut and Lloyd, 1826. (8 5/8 x 5 1/4 inches). x, 17-782, 47, [1]pp. With an engraved, hand-colored folding map on banknote paper by Lucas of Baltimore at front and a folding letterpress table (p.211). List of subscribers at rear. Title page inscribed " Tho. Williams, Jr. York" and later ownership inscription. Contemporary tree sheep, spine ruled gilt, red morocco lettering piece

The rare separately-published text to accompany Mills's Atlas of South Carolina: here complete with the state map not issued in all copies.

Robert Mills was born in Charleston in 1781 and studied under James Hoban, the Irish-born architect who designed the White House. In Washington, Mills made the acquaintance of Thomas Jefferson and studied in Jefferson's extensive architecture library before going to work as an assistant to Benjamin Latrobe in 1803. By 1809 he was established as an architect in Philadelphia, doing work in Baltimore and Richmond as well. In 1820, back in residence in South Carolina, he was appointed to that state's department of Public Works. In 1825, Mills published the first state atlas of South Carolina; indeed it would be the first American atlas devoted to any single state. Mills' Atlas was intimately associated with the trend in internal improvements that flourished in the United States in the first decades of the nineteenth century, and the maps in his atlas take great care to show the roads and rivers that were so important in facilitating transportation, communication, and commerce. The creation of these maps was an outgrowth of this trend, as states commissioned engineers and surveyors to create detailed and current maps. Between 1817 and 1821 manuscript maps were created for each district, based on astronomical, geodetic, and topographic surveys and field work, and using the latest scientific techniques. Aware of the surveying and cartographic work that had been undertaken in the state, Mills became determined to make the individual manuscript district maps more widely available by having them printed as an atlas. Mills undertook redrawing the district maps to make them uniform with each other. As part of this undertaking he traveled throughout the state, adding his personal observations and improvements to the maps. "Mills's Atlas of the State of South Carolina is a cartographic milestone because of its use of astronomical and scientific surveys for its district maps, its position as the first atlas of an individual state, and the impetus it gave to local and regional cartography in the early decades of the nineteenth century" (Ristow p.219). The present work was published, as Mills writes in the Preface, "in order that it might serve as an appendix to the author's Atlas of the State ... A correct idea of the several sections of the state could not be formed without it." It contains an immense amount of information relating to the state's history, natural history, climate, population, government, revenues and expenditures, internal improvements and more. "This book is, in fact, a history of every thing connected with the State of South Carolina, of general or local interest" (Sabin). According to Howes, the map, present here, was not issued in all copies and it is very rarely found.

Sabin 49118; Howes M-627; Pilling 2589.