Michigan in 1879 - Detroit, Lansing, Grand Rapids

This map of Michigan was published in 1879 by Rand McNally & Co. of Chicago as part of the fourth edition of their Business Atlas, a reference work prized by shippers, merchants, and travelers for its clarity and its thorough recording of the nation's rail network. The sheet is finished in outline color by county, with named railroad lines threaded across the state and relief indicated by hachures, oriented to both the Greenwich and Washington prime meridians in the transitional cartographic style of the period. It covers the state of Michigan in full, along with a portion of the neighboring Canadian shoreline across the Great Lakes. By 1879 Michigan stood firmly established as a manufacturing and shipping power built on its position at the heart of the Great Lakes system.

Detroit is marked as Michigan's dominant city, its position on the strait between Lake Erie and Lake St. Clair having made it an emerging industrial center by this date, its factories and shipyards feeding off the state's growing rail and water trade. Lake Michigan and Lake Huron are both prominently labeled, bordering the state's two peninsulas and underscoring how completely Michigan's economy depended on lake shipping for moving lumber, ore, and grain to market. The map's named railroads knit the Lower Peninsula's farms and towns to Detroit and to the wider national network beyond the state line. A portion of Canada appears across the water, a reminder of the cross-border shipping traffic that moved constantly through the Great Lakes. Together these features capture Michigan at a moment when rail and lake transport were reshaping its economy in tandem.

This map makes a fitting gift for anyone with roots in Detroit or the Lower Peninsula, or for a collector building a set of Rand McNally's Gilded Age state atlases. Buyers should note we also carry Michigan as mapped by Cram in 1875 and by Colton in 1855, as well as the state's northern Lake Superior region on a companion Rand McNally sheet from the same 1879 atlas and on an earlier 1874 map by Gray; this edition offers the clearest full-state view of Michigan's rail network at the height of its lake-shipping economy. It is available unframed in a full range of sizes, from a compact study print to a larger statement piece.