Arizona in 1893 - Prescott, Phoenix, Tucson

George F. Cram's name carried real weight in American map publishing by the 1890s, and the Columbian World's Fair Atlas, ninety state and territory maps produced for the 1893 Chicago World's Fair and distributed for Wood Brothers Cash Store of Unadilla, New York, shows why. This sheet covers Arizona, printed nearly two decades before the territory reached statehood.

The Arizona map marks county boundaries in red and labels the territory's leading towns; Prescott, Phoenix, and Tucson all appear, reflecting their standing as the territory's principal settlements in 1893. Hachures render the relief of Arizona's mountain ranges, and the map carries printed figures for population and area in square miles alongside both the Greenwich and Washington prime meridians. Drawn at a scale of 1:2,500,000, the sheet captures Arizona nearly twenty years before it became the forty-eighth state in 1912, during a period of rapid settlement and infrastructure growth in the post-Civil War American West.

It's a fitting print for an Arizona family with roots that go back to the territorial period, for someone who's since moved away from the state, or for a collector assembling a full set of Cram's 1893 state and territory maps. It also makes a good housewarming or birthday gift for an Arizonan. The print ships unframed and is available in multiple sizes.