Oregon Map 1875 Railroad Print - Salem, Portland, Astoria

This map of Oregon was published in 1875 by the Cram Atlas Company of Chicago and New York as part of its New Commercial Atlas of the United States and Territories, one of the rarest of George F. Cram's publications and issued as a large folio with full hand-painted color, a finish the firm abandoned within a decade in favor of cheaper machine coloring. Titled Cram's Rail Road & Township Map of Oregon, the sheet is colored by county and gives particular prominence to the state's railroad network, reflecting the atlas's purpose as a shippers' guide for the businessmen of the era. It covers Oregon sixteen years after statehood in 1859, at a period when rail construction was only beginning to link the state's interior valleys to its Pacific ports and to the transcontinental network further east.

Salem, the state capital on the Willamette River, sat near the center of the fertile Willamette Valley that held the great majority of Oregon's population and farmland. Portland, already the state's largest city, had grown into the Pacific Northwest's leading port at the valley's northern end, positioned where the Willamette meets the Columbia River. Astoria, at the mouth of the Columbia, held the distinction of being one of the oldest American settlements west of the Rocky Mountains, a fur-trade outpost turned fishing and shipping town. To the east, the Cascade Range divided this settled western Oregon from the drier ranching country beyond, a divide that shaped the very railroad routes this map was designed to show.

This map makes a fitting gift for anyone with family roots in the Willamette Valley towns of Salem and Portland, or ties to the old river port of Astoria, as well as for collectors of the rare hand-colored Cram folio atlases. This 1875 first edition predates the more common later Cram Oregon issues of 1878 and beyond, making it a scarcer find for anyone building a focused collection of nineteenth-century Oregon railroad maps. It is available unframed in a full range of sizes, from a compact study print to a larger statement piece.