Michigan in 1873 - Grand Rapids, Detroit, Lansing

John F. Tinkham drew the original large-scale survey of Grand Rapids that H.F. Walling reduced and adapted for this 1873 sheet, published as part of the first-ever Atlas of the State of Michigan, issued by R.M. & S.T. Tackabury of Detroit and printed by the Claremont Manufacturing Company of New Hampshire. As Michigan's inaugural state atlas, the volume set the pattern later state atlases would follow, and this Grand Rapids plan was hand-colored ward by ward rather than left as a plain black-and-white survey, a treatment usually reserved for the atlas's largest and fastest-growing cities. The map covers Grand Rapids in Kent County at a scale of 1:10,000, just six years after it was formally organized into a city government still expanding its administrative boundaries alongside its lumber and furniture industries.

The map divides Grand Rapids into eight numbered wards, each rendered in its own color, giving a precise picture of how the young city's municipal government carved up its rapidly growing population. The Grand River is traced running directly through the heart of the plan, the waterway that powered the city's early sawmills and gave Grand Rapids its name and its industrial start. Catholic Cemetery and Oakhill Cemetery are both marked, two of the city's principal burial grounds and a reminder of how quickly Grand Rapids had grown from a river trading post into a settled community needing permanent civic infrastructure. Railroad lines cross the sheet as well, tracing the rail connections that were beginning to carry the city's lumber and, soon after, its furniture trade to wider Michigan markets.

This is a natural find for a Grand Rapids or West Michigan family researching where an ancestor's ward or parish once stood, or for a Michigan transplant furnishing a new home with a piece of the state's early civic history. It is available unframed across a full range of sizes, from a compact study print to a larger statement piece for a living room or office wall.