Washington in 1874 - Olympia, Walla Walla, Vancouver

This map of Washington Territory was published in 1874 by Asher & Adams of New York for their New Commercial, Topographical, and Statistical Atlas and Gazetteer of the United States, an atlas noted for being among the first in the country built almost entirely around railroad lines rather than conventional topography. The territory is rendered as a hand-colored engraved map, relief shown by hachures and spot heights, with townships marked out in a spare, functional style the publishers themselves considered striking even by the more crowded standards of most commercial atlases. In 1874 Washington remained a territory, its towns still clustered almost entirely along the handful of rail lines then pushing into the interior, fifteen years before statehood would formally arrive.

Olympia, the territorial capital, occupied its long-standing seat at the head of Puget Sound, a modest town whose importance rested on government rather than commerce. Walla Walla, in the territory's southeastern wheat country, had grown into one of the interior's busiest towns thanks to its position along early wagon and rail routes from the Columbia River. Vancouver, on the north bank of the Columbia near the Oregon border, remained one of the territory's oldest American settlements, tracing its origins back to the fur-trade era. The Cascade Range divides all three from the rest of the territory, a mountainous spine that kept Washington's coastal and interior settlements loosely connected well into the railroad age.

This map makes a distinctive gift for anyone with family history in the Walla Walla valley, along the lower Columbia, or around Puget Sound during Washington's territorial years, or for a collector drawn to the earliest railroad-focused American atlases. Washington buyers should note we also carry the territory as mapped the following year by George F. Cram and later in the 1870s and 1880s by Rand McNally: this 1874 Asher & Adams edition is the earliest in our collection, hand-colored and engraved rather than printed. It is available unframed in a full range of sizes, from a compact study print to a larger statement piece.