Robert Allen Campbell (commonly cited as R.A. Campbell) was a prominent 19th-century American civil engineer, cartographer, and publisher. Operating primarily out of Chicago and St. Louis during the post-Civil War boom, he became renowned for creating some of the earliest, most geographically meticulous state-level atlases and gazetteers of the American Midwest.
Campbell specialized in high-detail, polyconic projection maps and regional descriptive atlases that combined geographic precision with historical and statistical data:
Campbell’s New Atlas of Missouri (1873): Published in St. Louis, this monumental work is widely recognized by historians as the earliest comprehensive Missouri state atlas, preceding individual county atlases. It featured highly precise county and city layouts lithographed by Gast & Co., alongside botanical data provided by George Engelmann of the Missouri Botanical Garden.
