Washington in 1893 - Seattle, Olympia, Spokane

In 1893, Wood Brothers Cash Store in Unadilla, New York handed this sheet to customers as a giveaway bound into The Columbian World's Fair Atlas, produced by Chicago cartographer George F. Cram to mark the Columbian Exposition and the 400th anniversary of Columbus's landing in the Americas.

The Washington map maps the state at a scale of 1:2,500,000, with county boundaries in hand-applied outline color and relief shown through hachure shading. The Columbia River is marked as a major geographic feature, and Puget Sound cuts deep into the state's western half, with Seattle and Tacoma both marked along its shores, port towns still rebuilding their rail and commercial standing after Seattle's Great Fire of 1889 leveled much of its downtown the same year the state joined the Union. The sheet carries both Greenwich and Washington as prime meridians, and captures the state only a few years into statehood, a period driven by logging, mining, and railroad growth.

A print like this suits anyone with Washington state roots, a Pacific Northwest transplant who wants a piece of home, or a collector working through Cram's 1893 series. TheMapVault also carries an 1883 Cram map of Washington Territory, made six years before statehood; that earlier sheet is a genuinely different document from this one, both in publisher and in the political status of the land it depicts. Every print ships unframed and comes in multiple sizes.