{"product_id":"iowa-map-1878-railroad-print-des-moines-dubuque-davenport","title":"Iowa Map 1878 Railroad Print - Des Moines, Dubuque, Davenport","description":"\u003cp\u003eGeorge Franklin Cram, working from his Western Map Depot in Chicago, published this Rail Road and Township Map of Iowa in 1878 as part of his Standard American Atlas of the United States, printed at a scale of nineteen miles to the inch for readers navigating the country's growing rail network. This sheet is hand-colored with township boundaries in red and a reference grid along its borders, drawn from the atlas's rare original printing rather than the smaller reprints Cram issued later in the 1880s. Iowa is shown here as a fully admitted state whose farmland, bounded by the Mississippi and Missouri rivers on either side, had by this date been almost completely subdivided and settled under the federal township system, a full generation after the state's own 1846 admission to the Union.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eDes Moines anchors the map as the state capital, a river town at Iowa's geographic center chosen for that position rather than any prior commercial importance. Dubuque appears on the Mississippi in the state's northeast, one of Iowa's oldest towns, its lead-mining origins long since given way to river trade and rail traffic. Davenport sits further south along the same river, part of the Quad Cities cluster whose rail bridge across the Mississippi had made it a key crossing point since the 1850s. Township boundaries in red blanket nearly the entire state, and together the two river towns and the central capital trace a state whose prairie had gone, within a single generation, from open land to fully surveyed farmland.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eThis sheet is a natural fit both for an Iowa family descended from the homesteaders who first broke this prairie into townships and for a collector piecing together the state's cartographic record decade by decade. The store also carries Iowa combined with Missouri in Mitchell's 1884 sheet and combined with Michigan and Wisconsin in Rogers \u0026amp; Johnston's earlier 1857 sheet, both multi-state groupings rather than dedicated state portraits; this 1878 Cram sheet is the only edition in the collection to map Iowa entirely on its own. It's printed unframed and available in a range of sizes to fit whatever wall it's headed for.\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"TheMapVault","offers":[{"title":"16x20 inch - UNFRAMED","offer_id":58513351278923,"sku":"SKU1445-16x20","price":34.0,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":true},{"title":"A2 (42x60cm) - UNFRAMED","offer_id":58513351311691,"sku":"SKU1445-A2","price":34.0,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":true},{"title":"18x24 inch - UNFRAMED","offer_id":58513351344459,"sku":"SKU1445-18x24","price":34.0,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":true},{"title":"50x70 cm - UNFRAMED","offer_id":58513351377227,"sku":"SKU1445-50x70","price":41.0,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":true},{"title":"A1 (60x84cm) - UNFRAMED","offer_id":58513351409995,"sku":"SKU1445-A1","price":55.0,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":true},{"title":"24x32 inch - UNFRAMED","offer_id":58513351442763,"sku":"SKU1445-24x32","price":55.0,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":true},{"title":"70x100 cm - UNFRAMED","offer_id":58513351475531,"sku":"SKU1445-70x100","price":68.0,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":true},{"title":"75x100 cm - UNFRAMED","offer_id":58513351508299,"sku":"SKU1445-75x100","price":68.0,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":true},{"title":"A0 (84x119cm) - UNFRAMED","offer_id":58513351541067,"sku":"SKU1445-A0","price":75.0,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0907\/2456\/5323\/files\/SKU1445.jpg?v=1789678431","url":"https:\/\/www.themapvault.com\/en-us\/products\/iowa-map-1878-railroad-print-des-moines-dubuque-davenport","provider":"TheMapVault","version":"1.0","type":"link"}