Alabama Map 1885 State Print - Birmingham, Montgomery, Mobile

This map of Alabama was published in 1885 by the Bradstreet Company of New York as part of Bradstreet's Pocket Atlas of the United States, a compact reference issued exclusively for the Boston clothing retailer Macullar, Parker & Company and bound into a burgundy leather cover small enough to carry in a coat pocket. Fittingly for a pocket atlas meant for quick reference, the sheet is a full-color map barely the size of a postcard, with relief shown in simple hachures and its prime meridian set to Washington rather than Greenwich, favoring domestic utility over international convention. It covers the state of Alabama in full, and it was produced during a period of rapid postwar industrialization, as new rail lines were being pushed through the state to link its growing cities to national markets.

Birmingham, still a young city founded only fourteen years earlier, appears alongside the older centers of Montgomery, Mobile, and Huntsville, together forming the demographic and economic core the map was built to document. The Alabama and Tombigbee Rivers are traced through the state's interior, waterways that had long shaped settlement patterns before the railroads arrived. Red lines marking rail routes run prominently across the sheet, underscoring how central that infrastructure had become to the state's economy by the mid-1880s. The Gulf of Mexico anchors Alabama's southern border, giving the state its access to maritime trade alongside its expanding rail network, while Tennessee, Georgia, Mississippi, and Florida form its remaining boundaries.

Anyone with Alabama roots, particularly around Birmingham, Montgomery, or Mobile, will find this map a good fit, as will a collector drawn to the small-format pocket atlases that traveling salesmen and businessmen actually carried in the 1880s rather than the larger parlor atlases meant for display. Its compact original size makes it an interesting contrast piece next to a full-scale Alabama map from the same decade. It is available unframed in a full range of sizes, from a compact study print to a larger statement piece.