Connecticut Map 1925 State Print - Hartford, New Haven, Bridgeport, Stamford

The George F. Cram Company of Chicago published this map of Connecticut in 1925 for its Unrivaled Atlas of the World, a postwar reference of 182 maps that updated state boundaries, roads, and infrastructure across the country following the First World War. By 1925 Connecticut was fully industrialized and increasingly electrified, and this map documents that modern landscape in color, tracking not only political boundaries and topography but also the electric lines then spreading across the state alongside its roads, drainage, coastline, and islands in Long Island Sound. Cram's postwar atlas ran to 182 maps in total, alongside statistical tables and a descriptive gazetteer covering every state and foreign country then recognized. The atlas's careful state-by-state revisions reflect Cram's effort to keep pace with America's rapid postwar modernization.

Hartford and New Haven remain the state's twin anchors, the former its capital and insurance center, the latter home to Yale University. Bridgeport, by this date one of Connecticut's largest manufacturing cities, and Stamford, growing rapidly as a New York commuter suburb, mark the state's booming southwestern corridor along the Sound. The map's electric lines and roads trace the infrastructure tying these cities together in the early automobile age, a very different transportation picture from the rail-centered maps of the previous century. The map's legend explains its symbols for state capitals, county seats, and the electric lines then spreading rapidly across the state's growing towns.

This 1925 Cram sheet documents Connecticut nearly a century after the 1836 Huntington schoolbook map also in this collection, and set together the two chart the state's full transformation from a canal-and-farm economy to a modern electrified, automobile-era landscape. This piece suits a collector of Cram atlas maps or a Connecticut native with ties to Hartford, New Haven, or the Fairfield County shoreline. It is offered unframed in a range of sizes. It rewards a close look from anyone who enjoys tracing a single American state across a full century of change.