Kansas & Nebraska Map 1884 Township Print - Topeka, Wichita, Omaha, Lincoln

Samuel Augustus Mitchell Jr., working through Wm. M. Bradley & Bro. of Philadelphia, issued this Kansas and Nebraska sheet in 1884, part of his New General Atlas published in 1886. This printing is hand-colored, its county and township lines laid out across both states at a genuinely local scale, tracking a stretch of the central Plains that had, by the mid-1880s, been substantially settled following two decades of homesteading and rail expansion. The sheet maps Kansas and Nebraska jointly, showing settlements, rivers, and railroads across a region whose economy had shifted from open range to organized farm counties.

County and township boundaries are laid out in fine detail across both states, a granular administrative view reflecting how thoroughly the Plains had been surveyed and divided by the 1880s. Railroads thread through both states, a dense network built to move grain and cattle to eastern markets, a sharp contrast to the sparse trails of earlier decades. Rivers, including the Kansas, Platte, and Republican systems, are worked into the base map beneath the county detail. Together the counties, the railroads, and the rivers sketch two states whose settlement had, by 1884, filled in from their eastern borders most of the way to their western edges.

For a Kansas or Nebraska family with homesteading-era roots, or a collector building out the two states' maps across the decades, this sheet has a specific pull. The store also carries Nebraska from Cram's 1893 and 1883 editions and Asher & Adams' 1874 railroad atlas, and Kansas from Cram's 1893 edition; this 1884 Mitchell sheet is the only one in the store to combine both states on a single county-level map. It's printed unframed and available in a range of sizes to fit whatever wall it's headed for.