Ohio in 1868 - Dayton, Columbus, Cincinnati

This map of Dayton was drawn by J.S. Binkerd under Henry Francis Walling's direction and published in New York in 1868 by H.H. Lloyd & Co. for Henry S. Stebbins, as part of the first edition of the Atlas of the State of Ohio. Lloyd's firm bound this debut edition with nineteen pages of historical and statistical text and a list of Ohio post offices, a research apparatus dropped or reshuffled in later printings, and hand-colored each map individually rather than relying on a single flat overprint. It covers Dayton in Montgomery County, a city whose canal-fed manufacturing base was still the dominant force in its economy in the years just after the Civil War, before the rail network that would later reshape it had fully taken hold.

The city's wards are numbered and washed in individual colors, marking out the administrative precincts used for local elections. The Miami River is drawn curving through the city, its course central to Dayton's mills and its canal-based trade. Bridges are marked at the principal river crossings, linking the wards on either bank, while the accompanying index lists cotton, paper, and woolen mills among the city's industrial sites. Woodland Cemetery appears as a named landmark on the map's edge. Read together, the wards, canals, bridges, and mill listings sketch a Dayton still organized around water power just as its rail-driven industrial expansion was beginning.

It makes a fitting choice for a Dayton or Montgomery County family, a collector of Ohio canal-era cartography, or anyone marking a move to the Miami Valley. This is the scarcer first edition of the Walling/Lloyd survey of Dayton, issued four years before the better-known 1872 Gray/Walling revision sold under the Stedman, Brown & Lyon imprint; where that later edition regroups the surrounding counties and swaps in updated city and thematic maps, this 1868 printing preserves the original Lloyd arrangement and its canal-focused industrial index. It's available unframed in a full range of sizes, from a compact study print to a larger statement piece.