Colorado Map 1878 Railroad Print - Denver, Colorado Springs, Pueblo

George Franklin Cram, working from his Western Map Depot in Chicago, published this Rail Road and Township Map of Colorado in 1878 as part of his Standard American Atlas of the United States, a hand-colored sheet with township boundaries marked in red, drawn just two years after Colorado's 1876 admission to the Union earned it the nickname the Centennial State. This printing comes from the atlas's rare original run, mapping a state whose mining-driven settlement was still pushing further into the Rocky Mountains at this date. Colorado appears here as one of the newest states in the entire atlas, its Front Range corridor densely surveyed while the rugged mountain interior further west remained largely a frontier of scattered, newly staked mining camps.

Denver anchors the map as the young state capital, its position at the base of the Rockies making it the natural supply and rail center for the mining camps scattered through the mountains beyond. Colorado Springs appears to the south as a newer town, founded only a few years earlier at the foot of Pikes Peak. Pueblo sits further south still, an industrial and rail town whose steel and smelting works were beginning to draw workers from across the state. The South Platte and Arkansas rivers cross the eastern plains, tracing routes once used by wagon trains and now followed by the railroads serving the same mining corridors, and together the three cities and two rivers describe a state only two years into statehood.

The frontier character this sheet still shows will be familiar to a Colorado family with mining-era or early-statehood roots, and it suits a collector marking the state's transition from territory to statehood. The store also carries Colorado from Cram's own later 1893, 1883, and 1874 editions and Mitchell's 1884 sheet, the 1874 edition notably predating statehood itself and showing Colorado still as a territory; this 1878 sheet is the earliest edition in the collection to map Colorado as a state rather than a territory. It's printed unframed and available in a range of sizes to fit whatever wall it's headed for.