United States Map 1915 Physical Features Print - Rocky Mountains, Appalachians, Mississippi River

Francis J. Marschner compiled and drew this Physical Features of the United States map for the U.S. Department of Agriculture's Atlas of American Agriculture, printed in Washington as part of a federal reference on the country's land, climate, soils, and vegetation prepared under O.E. Baker of the Bureau of Agricultural Economics. Drawn in 1915 on a polyconic projection at a scale of one to eight million, the sheet renders the country's terrain in full color using contour shading and hachures, with an extended block of geographical text printed along the bottom explaining the physical regions depicted. Predating the rest of the atlas by nearly a decade, this sheet served as the physical foundation the later soil, vegetation, and climate maps in the series were all built to explain.

The Rocky Mountains dominate the western third of the map in the darkest shading, their peaks and ranges, including the Sierra Nevada and Cascades further west, rendered with the steepest relief on the entire sheet. The Appalachians rise more modestly across the East, a long, comparatively gentle mountain chain that never reaches the elevations shown out west. The Mississippi River anchors the country's center as its dominant drainage system, while the Great Lakes are delineated clearly along the northern border. Together the two mountain systems and the river-and-lake network sketch the underlying terrain that would later determine where farmers could plow, where they had to irrigate, and where they could not farm at all.

Landforms and topography, rather than any single crop or climate variable, are the whole point of this sheet, which makes it a fitting gift for anyone drawn to physical geography and a natural addition for a collector of American terrain maps. The store also carries six companion sheets from the same Atlas of American Agriculture, covering great soil groups, parent materials of soils, natural vegetation, average annual precipitation, summer temperatures, and last spring frost dates; this sheet, drawn nearly a decade before most of the others, is the physical-geography foundation the rest of the atlas was built upon. It's printed unframed and available in a range of sizes to fit whatever wall it's headed for.