Alabama in 1879 - Montgomery, Birmingham, Mobile, Huntsville
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Rand, McNally & Company issued this map of Alabama in 1879 for their Business Atlas, the Chicago firm's first great national atlas and one built specifically for merchants, shippers, and travelers tracking the country's exploding rail network. This fourth edition, dated 1878-9 on its title page, renders every county in flat outline color and threads named railroad lines across the state, a level of commercial detail that set Rand McNally apart from the ornamental state atlases of an earlier generation. By 1879 Alabama had spent over a decade rebuilding since Reconstruction, and its rail lines shown here were the arteries carrying cotton, coal, and iron toward Mobile's port and the wider national market.
Montgomery, the state capital since 1846, anchors the map's center as the political hub of a state still defined by its plantation-belt agriculture. Birmingham, incorporated only in 1871, appears here as a young iron and coal town on the cusp of the industrial boom that would soon earn it the nickname the Pittsburgh of the South. Mobile, Alabama's only saltwater port, is shown commanding the Gulf trade at the mouth of the Alabama and Tombigbee river system, while Huntsville sits in the cotton-rich Tennessee Valley to the north. Together the map captures a state balanced between its old agrarian order and a fast-arriving industrial age.
A Tanner map of Alabama from 1833 also appears in this collection, and where that earlier work traces stagecoach roads and steamboat landings from the state's frontier decades, this 1879 Rand McNally sheet documents the rail-built Alabama that replaced it, with named lines rather than river routes carrying the state's commerce. That contrast makes a fitting pair for anyone assembling a timeline of Alabama's growth. This print suits a den, office, or study, and makes a thoughtful gift for a Montgomery or Birmingham native, a genealogist tracing Alabama roots, or a collector building out a set of Rand McNally state maps. It ships unframed and is available in multiple sizes.
