Pennsylvania, Maryland, New Jersey and Delaware in 1875 - Pittsburgh, Annapolis, Camden, Dover

This railroad and township map of Pennsylvania, Maryland, New Jersey and Delaware was published in 1875 by George Franklin Cram's Atlas Company for their New Commercial Atlas of the United States and Territories, a shippers' guide built specifically around the country's rail network. Cram's maps of this edition were issued as large hand-colored folio sheets, all drawn to the same scale of nineteen miles to the inch, and this example is considered among the rarest and most attractive the company produced before it shifted toward smaller, mass-market atlases later in the 1880s. Ten years after the Civil War, the four states shown here were in the midst of a railroad building boom that this sheet was designed to track county by county and line by line.

Pittsburgh, in Pennsylvania's western reaches, had become one of the nation's leading iron and steel centers, its rail connections critical to moving raw materials and finished goods east. Annapolis, Maryland's state capital, sat along the Chesapeake shoreline, a quieter counterpoint to Baltimore's busier port traffic further north. Camden, across the Delaware River from Philadelphia, functioned as a rail terminus feeding freight and passengers into the city. Dover, Delaware's capital, remained a modest inland town whose growth still depended heavily on the north-south rail lines the map highlights so prominently. Across all four states, the map's emphasis on railroads over roads reflects how completely rail had come to define regional commerce by 1875.

This map is a fitting choice for anyone with ties to the industrial rail corridors of Pennsylvania, Maryland, New Jersey or Delaware, or for a collector of Cram's scarce folio atlas maps. Pennsylvania buyers should also note we carry the state as mapped by Desilver's 1859 edition, by Mitchell's 1865 county map, and by Mitchell's 1860 sheet with New Jersey, Maryland and Delaware; this 1875 Cram edition is the only one in the group built entirely around the railroad network rather than roads or canals. It is available unframed in a full range of sizes, from a compact study print to a larger statement piece.