Pennsylvania Map 1882 County Print - Philadelphia, Pittsburgh, Harrisburg

Samuel Augustus Mitchell Jr., working through Wm. M. Bradley & Bro. of Philadelphia, issued this Pennsylvania sheet in 1882, part of his New General Atlas published in 1886, a later 19th-century production built around county-level detail across the full width of the state. This printing is hand-colored with relief shown through hachures, its counties laid out clearly from Philadelphia in the east to Pittsburgh in the west, tracking a state whose coal, iron, and rail industries had, by the 1880s, made it one of the country's industrial powerhouses. The sheet maps Pennsylvania statewide, a scope broader than the city-focused Philadelphia sheets that appear elsewhere in this collection.

Pennsylvania's counties are each shaded distinctly across the sheet, tracing a settlement and industrial pattern stretching from the state's older eastern cities to its coal- and iron-producing central and western reaches. Railroads thread throughout the state, a dense network built up over the decades since the Main Line of Public Works era that Tanner's earlier Pennsylvania sheet in this collection had captured. Rivers, including the Susquehanna and Allegheny systems, are worked into the base map beneath the administrative and rail detail. Together the counties, the railroads, and the rivers sketch a state whose 1882 economy had shifted decisively from canal-era trade to industrial-scale coal and rail.

For a Pennsylvania family with late-19th-century roots, someone who's settled in the state more recently, or a collector building out Pennsylvania's maps across the decades, this sheet has a specific pull. The store also carries Pennsylvania from Cram's 1893 and 1883 editions, two separate 1838 Bradford sheets, and Tanner's earlier 1840 canal-era sheet; this 1882 Mitchell sheet is the only one of the group built around the state's fully industrialized coal-and-rail economy rather than its earlier canal infrastructure. It's printed unframed and available in a range of sizes to fit whatever wall it's headed for.