New England Map 1878 Railroad Print - Portland, Concord, Montpelier, Boston, Providence

George Franklin Cram, working from his Western Map Depot in Chicago, published this Rail Road and County Map of New England in 1878 as part of his Standard American Atlas of the United States, a single hand-colored sheet combining Maine, New Hampshire, Vermont, and Massachusetts with county boundaries marked in red across all four states. This printing comes from the atlas's rare original run, covering a region whose rail network, the oldest in the country, had matured decades before the frontier states covered elsewhere in the same atlas. New England appears here as a long-settled region, its county lines and town boundaries essentially unchanged from decades earlier even as its economic weight was shifting toward the textile mills of southern New England.

Portland anchors the Maine side of the sheet as that state's largest port, its harbor tied closely to New England's shipping and fishing trade. Concord serves as New Hampshire's capital, seated on the Merrimack River in the state's interior, while Montpelier holds the same role for Vermont, a small town among the Green Mountains. Boston dominates the southern portion of the sheet as the region's commercial and cultural center, its rail lines radiating outward to connect all three northern capitals to the country's oldest and densest transportation network. The Connecticut River divides New Hampshire and Vermont, and together the four capitals and the river trace a region whose infrastructure had matured long before the western states this atlas otherwise covers.

This sheet offers a genuinely useful single-page record for a New England family with roots across any of these four states, and it suits a collector who would rather build out the region's maps state by state. The store also carries New Hampshire and Vermont combined from Cram's own later 1893 and 1883 editions, narrower in scope than this four-state sheet, and all nine northeastern states combined in Rogers & Johnston's earlier 1857 sheet, a much broader grouping than this one; this 1878 edition is the only sheet in the collection to combine these four specific states without Connecticut or Rhode Island. It's printed unframed and available in a range of sizes to fit whatever wall it's headed for.