Pennsylvania and New Jersey in 1874 - Philadelphia, Harrisburg, Trenton, Newark

This joint Pennsylvania and New Jersey map, titled Penn., N.J. on the original sheet, comes from Asher & Adams' New Commercial, Topographical, and Statistical Atlas and Gazetteer of the United States, published in New York in 1874. By this point Pennsylvania's oil boom, launched at Titusville in 1859, had matured into a major industry alongside the state's older anthracite coal trade, and the dense rail network crisscrossing both states on this map reflects just how thoroughly the region's economy had industrialized in the thirty-six years since Bradford's 1838 atlas. Franklin Type Foundry engraved and electrotyped the map, hand-colored with relief shown by hachures.

Counties, towns, and railroad lines are laid across both states on a single sheet, part of the most complete late-1874 edition of the atlas, bound in quarter leather with gilt-stamped boards — a far denser rail map than anything possible when the region relied mainly on canals.

Pennsylvania and New Jersey families alike tend to reach for this one, a Mid-Atlantic transplant, or a collector of 19th-century railroad atlases. For a closer look at either state alone in an earlier era, our 1838 Bradford sheets cover New Jersey and Pennsylvania separately, decades before this rail network existed. The print ships unframed and in multiple sizes.