Louisiana in 1875 - New Orleans, Baton Rouge, Shreveport

O.W. Gray of Philadelphia published this map of Louisiana in 1875 as part of Gray's National Atlas, one of the most commercially successful American atlases of the 1870s and among the last to rely on hand coloring at a time when cheaper lithographic tinting was becoming standard elsewhere in the trade. The Gray firm, one of the era's pre-eminent American map publishers, gave the sheet fine attractive color within a decorative border, coloring the state by parish rather than by the county system used almost everywhere outside Louisiana. Beyond parish lines, the map layers in roads, railroads, post offices, township survey grids, towns, rivers, lakes, and rail stations in dense, businesslike detail. It records Louisiana a decade after the Civil War, in the middle of Reconstruction, as the state's railroad network was being rebuilt and extended to reconnect its parishes to national commerce.

New Orleans anchors the map as Louisiana's dominant port and the commercial gateway for the entire Mississippi Valley, its stations and rail connections radiating out across the parish grid. Baton Rouge, the state capital since before the war, sits upriver as the political center around which the surrounding parishes are organized. Shreveport, in the state's northwestern corner, appears as the emerging hub of a very different Louisiana, a cotton and timber economy oriented toward Texas and Arkansas rather than the Gulf. The township survey grid overlaid across the map reflects the federal land-survey system that, unlike Louisiana's older French- and Spanish-derived parish boundaries, was only gradually extended across the state's more recently settled northern parishes.

This detailed 1875 Gray edition is a natural choice for a Louisiana family with parish-specific roots, a New Orleans or Shreveport transplant, or a collector assembling the state's postwar Reconstruction-era maps. Among the store's several Louisiana sheets, this one is closest in style to Colton's 1855 edition, both hand-colored parish maps from major national atlas publishers, though this later Gray map shows two additional decades of railroad growth that the antebellum Colton map could not yet record. It is available unframed in a full range of sizes.