Pennsylvania in 1865 - Harrisburg, Philadelphia, Pittsburgh

This county map of Pennsylvania was drawn and engraved by W.H. Gamble in Philadelphia for Mitchell's New General Atlas, published under Samuel Augustus Mitchell Jr. in 1865, the same year the Civil War came to a close. Mitchell's atlas was known for its clarity and its hand-applied color, and this sheet follows that house style closely, with each county washed in a distinct hue and relief indicated by hachures rather than the contour lines that would later become standard. The map uses the twin prime meridians of Greenwich and Washington common to American atlases of the period, and it presents Pennsylvania as a fully settled, industrially significant state just as the country turned from wartime production toward a long period of postwar economic expansion.

Harrisburg, seated on the Susquehanna River, was Pennsylvania's state capital and a rail hub that had carried enormous quantities of Union troops and supplies during the war just ended. Philadelphia remained the state's largest city, one of the country's leading centers of manufacturing, finance and shipbuilding. Pittsburgh, at the state's western edge where the Allegheny and Monongahela Rivers meet to form the Ohio, was already emerging as a center of iron and glass production that would soon make it synonymous with American heavy industry. Between these three centers, Pennsylvania's industrial and political weight in 1865 stretched from the Susquehanna to the Ohio River valley.

This map suits anyone with roots in Harrisburg, Philadelphia or the Pittsburgh industrial region, or a collector drawn to Mitchell's Civil War-era county atlases. Pennsylvania buyers should note we also carry the state as mapped by Charles Desilver's 1859 edition, by Mitchell's own 1860 sheet alongside New Jersey, Maryland and Delaware, and by Cram's 1875 railroad map of the same four states; this 1865 edition is the only one in our collection drawn in the immediate aftermath of the Civil War. It is available unframed in a full range of sizes, from a compact study print to a larger statement piece.