Northern Michigan in 1874 - Marquette, Sault Ste. Marie, Houghton

This map of Lake Superior and the northern part of Michigan was drawn by the civil and topographical engineer Ormando Willis Gray and published in 1874 by Stedman, Brown & Lyon of Philadelphia as part of Gray's Atlas of the United States, a series produced for the growing market of settlers and businessmen moving west after the Civil War. The sheet is colored to distinguish states, counties, and political boundaries, its terrain rendered with hachures and oriented to both the Washington and Greenwich prime meridians, roads and railroads carefully marked across a landscape still only lightly settled. It covers the Upper Peninsula of Michigan and the Lake Superior basin, extending into neighboring Minnesota and Wisconsin and along the northern shore of Lake Michigan. By 1874 this region was being rapidly opened up by rail construction tied directly to its copper, iron, and timber resources.

Lake Superior dominates the sheet, its rugged, sparsely settled southern shore having drawn prospectors north since the copper rush of the 1840s. Minnesota and Wisconsin both appear at the map's western edge, a reminder that the borders around Lake Superior were still being organized administratively even as mining companies pushed into the interior. The northern shore of Lake Michigan, traced along the peninsula's southern flank, connected the region's ports to the busy shipping lanes of the lower Great Lakes. Roads and railroads, still comparatively few in number, thread through the map to link isolated mining camps and timber towns to the water. Together these features capture a genuinely frontier landscape, its economy built almost entirely on what could be pulled from its mines and forests and shipped out by lake.

This map makes a fitting gift for anyone with ties to Michigan's Upper Peninsula and Lake Superior mining country, or for a collector interested in the westward-looking atlases produced for California-bound settlers in the 1870s. Buyers should note we also carry this same Lake Superior and northern Michigan region as mapped five years later by Rand McNally in 1879, once the area's rail network had matured considerably; this 1874 Gray edition captures the region at an earlier, rawer stage of its mining boom. It is available unframed in a full range of sizes, from a compact study print to a larger statement piece.