Washington Territory Map 1878 Railroad Print - Olympia, Seattle, Walla Walla

George Franklin Cram, working from his Western Map Depot in Chicago, published this Rail Road and Township Map of Washington Territory in 1878 as part of his Standard American Atlas of the United States, a large-folio, hand-colored atlas built for business travelers navigating the country's expanding rail network. This sheet comes from the atlas's rare original printing, colored by county across a territory whose county boundaries were still being drawn as new settlement pushed inland from Puget Sound. Washington remained a federal territory at this date, more than a decade from the statehood it would finally reach in 1889, its economy still overwhelmingly built on timber cut from the dense forests ringing the Sound and shipped out through a handful of small port towns.

Olympia anchors the map as the territorial capital, positioned at the Sound's southern tip where the earliest territorial government had settled decades before. Seattle appears as one port town among several, its later dominance still years away and nothing on this map suggesting it would eventually eclipse its rivals. Walla Walla marks the wheat country east of the Cascades, an agricultural district whose character and economy had little in common with the timber towns on the coast. The Columbia River forms the territory's entire southern boundary, cutting Washington off from Oregon and channeling much of the inland wheat trade toward Portland rather than the Sound.

Washington wouldn't become a state for another eleven years after this sheet was printed, a fact that gives it real appeal both for a family with roots on the Sound or in the inland wheat country and for a collector tracing the territory's path to statehood. The store's other Washington holdings include the 1893 and 1883 Cram issues, an 1874 sheet centered on Puget Sound, an 1884 edition paired with Oregon, and an 1836 city plan of the future capital; this 1878 map is the earliest full territorial survey in that group. It's printed unframed and available in a range of sizes to fit whatever wall it's headed for.