Ohio in 1872 - Cleveland, Cuyahoga County, Akron

H.F. Walling, Ormando Willis Gray, and H.H. Lloyd jointly prepared this map of Cleveland for Stedman, Brown & Lyon's 1872 New Topographical Atlas of the State of Ohio, a Cincinnati-published volume compiled directly from data furnished by the city engineer rather than the more general survey work behind most contemporary state atlases. The Cleveland sheet was finished in hand-colored lithography, its pastel wash of pinks, yellows, blues, and greens used specifically to separate the city's numbered wards, a level of political-boundary detail the atlas gave to few other Ohio cities. The map covers Cleveland, Cuyahoga County, Ohio, at a scale of roughly 1:18,000, only seven years after the Civil War, during the same postwar industrial surge that was turning Cleveland from a modest lake port into an emerging center of oil refining and heavy manufacturing.

Lake Erie runs along the map's northern edge, the harbor that had made Cleveland a shipping point since its founding and was now drawing new industry to its shoreline. The Cuyahoga River winds through the plan exactly as it does through the city itself, the crooked waterway whose industrial banks were already becoming central to Cleveland's postwar economy. Each of the city's wards is numbered and colored individually, giving a precise picture of how Cleveland's municipal government had divided a rapidly growing population barely two decades after incorporation. Together the lake, the river, and the ward boundaries capture Cleveland at the exact moment it was shifting from a lake-trade town into an industrial city.

This engineer's-data edition suits a Cleveland or Cuyahoga County family researching which ward an ancestor's home fell within during Reconstruction, and it pairs naturally with the store's 1945 anniversary map of Cleveland and Ohio City; where that later sheet looks back nostalgically to the two towns' 1836 founding, this 1872 Walling and Gray plan is a working document of the fully merged, modernizing city as it actually stood at the time. It is available unframed in a full range of sizes, from a compact study print to a larger statement piece.