Nevada in 1893 - Carson City, Reno, Virginia City

Wood Brothers Cash Store of Unadilla, New York handed this map to customers in 1893 as part of a promotional atlas commissioned from Chicago publisher George F. Cram, produced to mark that year's Columbian Exposition in Chicago, the fair that celebrated the 400th anniversary of Columbus's landing in the New World.

The Nevada map is an outline map with hand-applied color marking county lines and relief rendered through hachure shading, at a scale of roughly 1:2,000,000. An inset in the corner continues the map beyond the main sheet's edge, and the sheet names the Ralston Desert among its topographical features, a reminder of how much of the state is basin-and-range desert rather than farmland. Virginia City and the Comstock Lode it sat atop had already passed their silver-boom peak by 1893, but the towns and railroads that mining wealth built still shaped the map's sparse settlement pattern. Population and area figures in square miles are printed alongside the map, and both Greenwich and Washington are given as prime meridians.

A print like this suits anyone with Nevada roots, a transplant who left the Silver State and wants a piece of it on the wall, or a collector working through Cram's 1893 series state by state. TheMapVault also carries an 1883 Cram map of Nevada from an earlier atlas; this is a different sheet entirely, the 1893 Columbian World's Fair Atlas edition, printed a full decade later and in a different style. Every print ships unframed and is offered in multiple sizes.