Missouri and Illinois in 1865 - St. Louis, Chicago, Springfield

This map pairing St. Louis and Chicago was engraved by G.W. Colton and published in 1865 by J.H. Colton of New York, appearing in Colton's General Atlas during a brief window between Colton's earlier Family Atlas partnership with Johnson and his retirement in 1864, which makes this particular J.H. Colton-credited 1865 printing scarcer than the more commonly found 1866 edition credited to G.W. & C.B. Colton that followed. The sheet takes an unusual approach for the period, enclosing two entirely separate city maps within a single ornate border and drawing both cities to the identical scale so their footprints can be measured directly against one another. Full color is used to mark political boundaries within each city, consistent with the confident, richly bordered house style Colton's workshop was known for. The sheet pairs St. Louis, Missouri, with Chicago, Illinois, just months after the end of the Civil War, when both cities were positioning themselves as the chief rival gateways for the trade of the Mississippi Valley and the Great Lakes.

St. Louis is shown along the Mississippi River, already a well-established hub for river trade and the gateway through which goods and settlers had long moved into the trans-Mississippi West. Chicago, by contrast, sits at the edge of the Great Lakes, its street grid reflecting the explosive growth that was fast making it a rival to St. Louis for control of the nation's interior trade. The deliberate choice to draw both cities at matching scale invites direct comparison of their size and layout, a publisher's device that turns the sheet into a visual argument about which city was pulling ahead in 1865. Streets, waterways, and major thoroughfares are marked in each city, giving a working picture of two river-and-lake ports on the cusp of the postwar economic boom.

This sheet suits a collector with Midwest roots split between Missouri and Illinois, or anyone drawn to the rivalry between the great gateway cities of the Mississippi and the Great Lakes. It is a companion, in format if not geography, to the store's 1856 Colton sheet pairing Pittsburgh and Allegheny with Cincinnati, part of the same publisher's tradition of setting two growing American cities side by side under one title. It is available unframed in a full range of sizes, from a compact study print to a larger statement piece.