Louisiana Map 1878 Railroad Print - New Orleans, Baton Rouge, Shreveport

George Franklin Cram, working from his Western Map Depot in Chicago, published this Rail Road and Township Map of Louisiana in 1878 as part of his Standard American Atlas of the United States, a large-folio, hand-colored atlas built as a business traveler's guide to the country's expanding railroads. This sheet is colored by parish rather than by county, reflecting Louisiana's distinctive civil administrative system inherited from its French and Spanish colonial past, and it belongs to the same rare, early printing of the atlas that predates Cram's later, smaller reprints. The map records Louisiana in the very year Reconstruction formally ended in the state, as the last federal troops withdrew from New Orleans and the disputed 1876 election finally resolved in favor of a Democratic state government reasserting home rule after more than a decade of federal oversight.

Baton Rouge anchors the map as the state capital, a position it had held on and off since before the war and would keep permanently from this point forward. New Orleans dominates the map's lower reaches as the state's great port city, its position on the Mississippi River Delta making it the commercial gateway for the entire lower valley. Shreveport marks the state's northwestern corner on the Red River, a cotton and river-trade town far removed from New Orleans in both distance and character. Running through all three is the sugar economy of the parishes south of Baton Rouge, land drained by bayous and worked by a plantation system only recently reorganized after emancipation.

A Louisiana family with roots in the river parishes will find more here than a generic decade; so will a collector building out the state's post-war cartographic record, since this sheet lands on a genuinely pivotal year. The store's other Louisiana holdings include the 1838, 1839, and 1841 Tanner editions from the antebellum period and an 1893 Cram sheet from the following generation; this 1878 map is the only one in the collection printed in the exact year Reconstruction itself came to a close. It's printed unframed and available in a range of sizes to fit whatever wall it's headed for.