Arkansas Map 1878 Railroad Print - Little Rock, Fort Smith, Fayetteville

George Franklin Cram, working from his Western Map Depot in Chicago, published this Rail Road and Township Map of Arkansas in 1878 as part of his Standard American Atlas of the United States, printed at a scale of nineteen miles to the inch with township boundaries hand-colored in red and a reference grid along the borders. This sheet belongs to the atlas's rare original printing, mapping a state whose eastern lowlands and western Ozark uplands had developed along very different lines by the late 1870s. Arkansas appears here still overwhelmingly rural, its rail network reaching well into the fertile Mississippi lowlands in the east while thinning noticeably toward the mountainous Ozark Plateau in the northwest, barely four decades after the state itself had entered the Union.

Little Rock anchors the map as the state capital, positioned on the Arkansas River at the boundary between the eastern lowlands and the hillier country to the west. Fort Smith sits at the state's western edge on the same river, a former military post whose position on the border with Indian Territory had long made it a trading and supply point. Fayetteville, deep in the Ozark uplands, appears as a smaller market town whose isolation from the rail network reflects the rugged terrain surrounding it. The Mississippi and White rivers bound the state's eastern lowlands on either side, and together the capital, the border post, and the upland town trace a state developing at two distinctly different speeds.

This sheet reflects the same east-west divide that still shapes family history for many Arkansans, whether their roots lie in the Mississippi lowlands or the Ozark hill country, and it suits a collector building out the state's maps across the decades. The store also carries Arkansas from Cram's own later 1893 and 1883 editions, Bradford's 1838 atlas, and combined with Illinois and Missouri in Rogers & Johnston's earlier 1857 sheet, a three-state grouping quite different in scope from this dedicated state portrait; this 1878 sheet is the earliest Cram edition of Arkansas alone that the store carries. It's printed unframed and available in a range of sizes to fit whatever wall it's headed for.