Wisconsin Map 1855 State Print - Milwaukee, Madison, Green Bay

This map of Wisconsin was engraved for G.W. Colton of New York and published in 1855 in Colton's General Atlas, the firm's ambitious steel-engraved atlas of some one hundred and eighty maps that established J.H. Colton & Co. as one of the leading American map publishers of the mid-nineteenth century. The sheet is finished in the firm's characteristic style: bold, flat county coloring set inside an ornate decorative border, with a separate inset in the lower corner devoted to the vicinity of Milwaukee, a level of city-specific detail unusual on a general state map of this size. It covers the young state of Wisconsin county by county, only seven years after statehood in 1848, at a time when settlement and rail construction were still actively pushing the state's population and boundaries into shape.

Milwaukee receives its own separate inset in the lower corner, underscoring its role as Wisconsin's principal Lake Michigan port and the main gateway for the German and Scandinavian immigration reshaping the state through the 1850s. Lake Michigan runs the length of the state's eastern boundary and Lake Superior traces its northern edge, the two Great Lakes bounding a state whose commerce leaned heavily on lake shipping rather than the rail lines still under construction inland. Madison, chosen as state capital for its central, lake-ringed site, anchored the young government even as the bulk of settlement and trade activity clustered along the Milwaukee waterfront. Wisconsin's counties, laid out in flat color across the sheet, record a state still being subdivided as settlers pushed steadily northward and west.

This map suits a Wisconsin family with roots along the Milwaukee waterfront, a Badger State transplant furnishing a new home, or a collector drawn to the ornate steel-engraved artwork of Colton's General Atlas. The Milwaukee inset in particular makes it a pointed gift for anyone with ties to that city specifically, rather than to the state at large, and the map's mid-1850s snapshot of a still-forming Wisconsin gives it real appeal for anyone tracing family arrival in the decade after statehood. It is available unframed in a full range of sizes, from a compact study print to a larger statement piece.