Indiana Map 1878 Railroad Print - Indianapolis, Fort Wayne, Evansville

George Franklin Cram, working from his Western Map Depot in Chicago, published this Rail Road and Township Map of Indiana in 1878 as part of his Standard American Atlas of the United States, printed as a tall-format sheet hand-colored with township boundaries in red across the entire state. This printing belongs to the atlas's rare original run, mapping a state whose central location between the eastern seaboard and the western frontier had made it a natural crossroads for rail traffic moving in every direction by the late 1870s. Indiana is shown here as a fully settled state, its townships surveyed from the Ohio River in the south to the shore of Lake Michigan in the north, more than sixty years after it had first entered the Union.

Indianapolis anchors the map at the state's center, its position chosen decades earlier specifically to sit equidistant from Indiana's borders, and by 1878 that central location had made it a genuine rail hub with lines converging from every direction. Fort Wayne appears to the northeast as a secondary hub along the same network, while Evansville sits in the state's far southwest on the Ohio River, its river trade predating the railroads by decades. The Wabash and White rivers cross the state and are marked as historic transportation corridors that carried Indiana's trade long before rail lines followed largely the same routes. Together the capital and the two flanking cities trace a state whose central position made it indispensable to traffic moving east and west.

This sheet is a fitting addition both for an Indiana family with roots in any of these rail or river towns and for a collector building out the state's maps across the decades. The store also carries Indiana from Cram's own later 1893, 1883, and 1884 editions, each printed after further rail lines had filled in the network shown here, Bradford's 1838 atlas from decades before the railroads arrived, and Tanner's 1841 sheet; this 1878 edition is the earliest Cram printing of Indiana the store carries, built specifically around the state's Indianapolis-centered rail hub. It's printed unframed and available in a range of sizes to fit whatever wall it's headed for.