Ohio in 1872 - Cincinnati, Columbus, Dayton

This map of Cincinnati was surveyed and drawn in 1872 by Ormando Willis Gray together with H.F. Walling and H.H. Lloyd, and published the same year by Stedman, Brown & Lyon of Cincinnati as part of their New Topographical Atlas of the State of Ohio. That atlas was an ambitious statewide survey project, pairing county-by-county topographical mapping with a run of detailed city plans, of which this Cincinnati sheet, spanning two full pages, was among the largest. The map is hand-colored ward by ward in pink, yellow, green, and blue, a coding scheme chosen for administrative clarity rather than decoration, giving it a more functional, working-document character than the same publisher's later parlor atlases. It covers the city of Cincinnati, Ohio, in the early 1870s, a period of rapid population growth and annexation as the city absorbed outlying settlements and organized its expanding population into a growing number of numbered wards.

The Ohio River is traced prominently along the southern edge of the sheet, the waterway around which Cincinnati had grown since its founding and which, by 1872, still carried much of the city's pork, whiskey, and manufactured goods to markets downriver. Each numbered ward is picked out in its own pastel tint, a system that let the city's growing population of officials, tax assessors, and voters read municipal boundaries at a glance during a decade of rapid annexation. Cincinnati's hills, which confine the city's older core to a narrow basin along the river, are implicit in the crowded street grid near the waterfront giving way to a looser pattern further back from the water. This ward-by-ward approach to color reflects how central administrative organization had become to managing a city that, by the 1870s, ranked among the largest in the country.

This map is a fitting choice for anyone tracing family history through a specific Cincinnati ward, a local historian, or a collector assembling the city's nineteenth-century development year by year. Alongside the earlier 1868 Phillips map and the later, more ornamental 1877 Gray edition also offered in this collection, this 1872 sheet captures Cincinnati mid-transition, its wards multiplying under the same Gray survey team that would revisit the city five years later in more decorative form. It is available unframed in a full range of sizes, from a compact study print to a larger statement piece.