Arkansas in 1893 - Little Rock, Fayetteville, Fort Smith

In 1893, shoppers at Wood Brothers Cash Store in Unadilla, New York received this map as a free premium bound into The Columbian World's Fair Atlas, a volume Chicago mapmaker George F. Cram published to mark the World's Fair and the 400th anniversary of Columbus's landing. A small-town promotional giveaway, it now stands as a genuine piece of late-Victorian American cartography.

This map renders Arkansas at a scale of 1:1,800,000, with county lines picked out in red hand-applied color against a network of roads, railroads, and rivers. Little Rock, the state capital, is marked prominently as one of the state's key administrative centers, and the map draws a real distinction visible in its terrain between the flatter Delta lowlands in the east, given over to cotton, and the more rugged Ozark and Ouachita highlands in the northwest and west. Hot Springs, already drawing visitors to its mineral waters by 1893, is also marked. The sheet carries printed figures for the state's population and total area in square miles, with prime meridians for both Greenwich and Washington running along the borders.

This print suits anyone with Arkansas roots, a transplant who left the Ozarks or the Delta and wants a piece of it on the wall, or a collector working through Cram's 1893 series state by state. It ships unframed and comes in multiple sizes, a fitting housewarming, birthday, or anniversary gift.