Alabama in 1899 - Birmingham, Montgomery, Mobile

Geo. F. Cram issued this map of Birmingham in 1899 as part of his Standard American Railway System Atlas of the World, a New York- and Chicago-published volume built specifically to trace the nation's rail network town by town alongside the more conventional political and topographical detail found in a standard atlas. The Birmingham sheet is rendered as a colored lithograph with relief shown in hachures, a technique that let Cram's engravers indicate the hilly terrain ringing the city without resorting to shading that would have obscured the dense grid of streets and rail lines below. The map covers Birmingham, Alabama, barely three decades after its founding, at the exact moment the city's iron and steel furnaces had earned it the nickname "the Magic City" for the speed of its industrial growth.

North Birmingham is marked as its own district north of the core grid, one of the mill and furnace neighborhoods that grew up almost overnight around the city's iron works. Railroads are laid across the sheet in heavy black lines, reflecting Birmingham's position at the junction of several competing lines that made it the primary rail gateway for Alabama's coal and iron trade. Bridges crossing the city's waterways are marked as well, connecting the expanding residential wards to the industrial districts on the map's edges. Streets are plotted in a tight organized grid, evidence of how quickly Birmingham's founders had to lay out a functioning city around an industry that was growing faster than the town itself.

This print suits an Alabama family with Birmingham roots in the iron and steel trades, a Magic City transplant furnishing a new home, or a collector building out a set of Cram's 1899 Southern city maps. It is available unframed in a full range of sizes, from a compact study print up to a larger statement piece for an office or stairwell.