Colorado in 1875 - Denver, Pueblo, Colorado Springs, Golden

George F. Cram, proprietor of the Western Map Depot in Chicago, published this large folio railroad and township map of Colorado in 1875 for his New Commercial Atlas of the United States and Territories, one of the rarest and most attractive of Cram's atlas productions and printed on a uniform scale of nineteen miles to the inch across the whole series. Fully hand colored by county with railroad lines picked out clearly, the sheet was built for shippers and businessmen navigating a territory that would not achieve statehood for another year. Colorado in 1875 was in the middle of a mining and railroad boom that had transformed it from a remote territory into one of the West's fastest-growing regions.

Denver, already established as the territorial capital and commercial center along the South Platte River, anchors the map at the heart of the developing rail network. Pueblo, to the south, had grown into a key steel and rail junction town, while Colorado Springs, founded only four years earlier in 1871, appears as a young resort community at the base of Pikes Peak. Golden, once briefly the territorial capital itself, sits in the foothills west of Denver near the earliest mining routes into the mountains. The map's township grid reflects the rapid survey and settlement then underway across the territory. The map's township grid, laid over the mountainous terrain, reflects the rapid survey work needed to keep pace with Colorado's mining boom.

Rand McNally issued its own Colorado county map only four years later in 1879, also included in this collection in two separate impressions, and set beside this earlier Cram railroad sheet the pair shows how quickly Colorado's rail lines multiplied in the run-up to and immediately following statehood in 1876. This piece is a strong pick for a Denver or Colorado Springs native, a collector of Western railroad maps, or anyone furnishing a mountain home. It is offered unframed in a range of sizes.