Georgia & Alabama Map 1884 County Print - Savannah, Atlanta, Montgomery

Samuel Augustus Mitchell Jr., working through Wm. M. Bradley & Bro. of Philadelphia, issued this Georgia and Alabama sheet in 1884, part of his New General Atlas published in 1886. This printing carries two city insets, Savannah and the City of Atlanta, described on the sheet as the capital of Georgia, a designation Atlanta had held only since 1868 after replacing Milledgeville in the reorganization that followed the Civil War. The sheet maps Georgia and Alabama jointly, their counties shaded in Mitchell's characteristic style across two states whose cotton economy had spent nearly two decades rebuilding since the war's end.

Savannah's inset reflects the city's long-standing role as Georgia's dominant Atlantic port, while Atlanta's inset captures a comparatively new capital that had, by 1884, already begun its rapid rise as the state's rail and commercial hub. County boundaries across both states are laid out distinctly, tracing settlement patterns still centered on cotton cultivation across the Deep South's interior. Railroads thread through both states, a network rebuilt and expanded through the postwar decades, with Atlanta itself having grown up originally as a rail terminus. Together the Savannah and Atlanta insets, the counties, and the railroads sketch two states whose economic center of gravity was shifting from coastal ports toward inland rail hubs.

For a Georgia or Alabama family with Savannah or Atlanta roots, or a collector building out the region's maps across the decades, this sheet has a specific pull. The store also carries Georgia and Alabama separately from Cram's 1893 edition, combined with South Carolina and Florida in Cram's 1883 edition, and separately again in Bradford's 1838 atlas and Tanner's earlier 1839-41 sheets; this 1884 Mitchell sheet is the only one of the group to pair Savannah with Atlanta's postwar rise as the two states' two most distinct urban stories. It's printed unframed and available in a range of sizes to fit whatever wall it's headed for.