Colorado Map 1884 State Print - Denver, Colorado Springs, Leadville

Samuel Augustus Mitchell Jr., working through Wm. M. Bradley & Bro. of Philadelphia, issued this Colorado sheet in 1884, part of his New General Atlas published in 1886. This printing is hand-colored with relief shown through hachures, its counties laid out clearly across a state whose mining and rail economy had, by the mid-1880s, matured considerably since its 1876 admission to the Union as the Centennial State. The sheet maps Colorado statewide, tracking settlements, railroads, and rivers across a state whose Rocky Mountain interior had, in the decade since statehood, filled in with a genuine network of mining towns and connecting rail lines.

Colorado's counties are shaded distinctly across the sheet, a settlement pattern radiating out from Denver as the state's rail and supply hub toward the mining camps scattered through the mountains. Railroads crisscross the state in far greater density than the territorial-era maps in this collection could show, a network built out specifically to serve the mining industry that had drawn settlers into the Rockies. Rivers, including the South Platte and Arkansas systems, trace the valleys around which both settlement and rail construction concentrated. Together the counties, the dense rail network, and the rivers sketch a state whose decade of statehood had brought a level of infrastructure its earlier territorial maps couldn't have shown.

For a Colorado family with mining-era or early-statehood roots, someone who's settled in the state more recently, or a collector building out Colorado's maps across the decades, this sheet has a specific pull. The store also carries Colorado from Cram's 1893 and 1883 editions, and from Asher & Adams' 1874 territorial-era railroad atlas; this 1884 Mitchell sheet is the only one of the group drawn after statehood but before Cram's later, more general reference editions, capturing the state at the height of its rail-driven mining boom. It's printed unframed and available in a range of sizes to fit whatever wall it's headed for.