Georgia Map 1878 Railroad Print - Atlanta, Savannah, Augusta

George Franklin Cram, working from his Western Map Depot in Chicago, published this Rail Road and Township Map of Georgia in 1878 as part of his Standard American Atlas of the United States, a hand-colored sheet with township boundaries marked in red across a state whose rail network was central to both its wartime devastation and its postwar recovery. This printing comes from the atlas's rare original run, drawn as Atlanta, largely destroyed during Sherman's 1864 campaign, continued rebuilding into its new role as the state's rail hub and capital in place of the older river towns that had once dominated. Georgia appears here visibly recovering, its rail lines steadily restored through the 1870s along much of the same routes that had once made the state a military target.

Atlanta anchors the map at the convergence of several rail lines, the same strategic position that had made it central to Sherman's 1864 campaign now serving the state's postwar commerce instead. Savannah appears on the Atlantic coast as Georgia's historic port, its prewar wealth built on cotton exports that the war had badly disrupted. Augusta sits upstream on the Savannah River, a smaller river town whose trade connected the interior cotton counties to the coast. The Chattahoochee River crosses the state's western half, and together the rebuilt rail hub, the coastal port, and the river town trace a state whose recovery from wartime destruction was, by 1878, visibly underway.

This sheet documents Georgia's recovery directly, a detail that will resonate with a family rooted in the Reconstruction-era rail or cotton counties and with a collector tracking how thoroughly Sherman's march reshaped the state's later cartography. The store also carries Georgia from Cram's own later 1893 edition, printed after the state's rail network had matured well beyond what this sheet shows, Bradford's 1838 atlas from decades before the war, and Georgia combined with Alabama, South Carolina, and Florida in both Asher & Adams' 1883 and Rogers & Johnston's 1857 sheets; this 1878 edition is the earliest Cram printing of Georgia alone the store carries. It's printed unframed and available in a range of sizes to fit whatever wall it's headed for.