Iowa in 1883 - Des Moines, Cedar Rapids, Davenport

This Iowa map is drawn from Cram's Unrivaled Family Atlas of the World, copyrighted 1883 by George Franklin Cram and published in Chicago by A.C. Shewey and Co., a first edition remembered as Cram's first "mass production" world atlas. The sixty-five-map volume was built to bring detailed, current geography to a broad American audience during a period of westward settlement.

Iowa is printed here with outline color marking its county boundaries, each county distinctly shaded for easy differentiation, relief suggested through hachures at a scale of about 1:1,900,000. The sheet traces the state's railroads and rivers, underscoring how central both were to Iowa's economy and settlement patterns in the 1880s, with the Mississippi forming its eastern border and the Missouri its western one. By 1883 Iowa's prairie soil had made it one of the country's leading corn and hog producers, the same farmland the county lines on this sheet carve up county by county. Both Greenwich and Washington prime meridians are marked on the map.

This print suits anyone with Iowa roots, a family that farmed near one of these counties generations back, a transplant who left the Hawkeye State, or a collector building a run of Cram's 1883 atlas maps. It also makes a fitting housewarming, birthday, or anniversary gift. Every print ships unframed and comes in multiple sizes.