Kentucky & Tennessee Map 1878 Railroad Print - Frankfort, Louisville, Nashville, Memphis

George Franklin Cram, working from his Western Map Depot in Chicago, published this Rail Road and Township Map of Kentucky and Tennessee in 1878 as part of his Standard American Atlas of the United States, a large, tall-format sheet hand-colored with township and county boundaries in red across both states. This printing comes from the atlas's rare original plates, pairing two states whose rail networks had already matured considerably by the late 1870s thanks to their prewar role as a transportation corridor between the Ohio Valley and the Deep South. The sheet records both states well into their postwar recovery, their rail lines largely rebuilt and, in several corridors, expanded well beyond their antebellum extent by the year this map was printed.

Frankfort anchors Kentucky's side of the map as its capital, a smaller town overshadowed commercially by Louisville, which appears on the Ohio River as the state's dominant port and rail hub. Nashville, Tennessee's capital, sits at the center of a dense rail network radiating in every direction. Memphis anchors the state's southwestern corner on the Mississippi River as its principal cotton and river-trade port. The Cumberland and Tennessee rivers cross Tennessee's interior, and together the four cities and three rivers describe a well-established transportation corridor that had linked the upper and lower South for decades before this sheet was printed.

This sheet marks a specific point in the cartographic record of both states, a detail that will matter to a Kentucky or Tennessee family with roots along the old river and rail towns and to a collector tracking the pairing across multiple editions. The store also carries Kentucky and Tennessee together from Cram's own later 1893, 1884, and 1883 editions, each printed after further rail expansion had filled in the network shown here only partially, and Kentucky alone from Tanner's 1838 and 1839 sheets, drawn four decades earlier; this 1878 edition is the earliest Cram printing of the pairing the store carries. It's printed unframed and available in a range of sizes to fit whatever wall it's headed for.