Arkansas, Louisiana, and Mississippi in 1883 - Little Rock, New Orleans, Jackson

This is the New Rail Road and County Map of Arkansas, Louisiana, & Mississippi, a map from Cram's Unrivaled Family Atlas of the World, copyrighted 1883 by George Franklin Cram and published in Chicago by A.C. Shewey and Co. It belongs to the first edition of Cram's first "mass production" world atlas, sixty-five maps aimed at putting detailed geography within reach of ordinary households during a period of rapid national growth.

Likely produced by lithography, the sheet is printed in full color at a scale of about 1:2,300,000, with red outlining state boundaries and green marking county borders across all three states. Railroads are marked prominently, reflecting how central rail transport had become to the postwar South, and the Mississippi River is traced as it forms part of the eastern boundary of both Arkansas and Mississippi. A decade after the Civil War's end, the cotton plantations that once ran on enslaved labor across all three states had been reorganized around sharecropping, a system the county lines and rail depots on this map quietly served by moving crops to market. Both Greenwich and Washington prime meridians appear on the sheet.

This print suits anyone with roots in Arkansas, Louisiana, or Mississippi, a family that farmed or worked the rail lines shown here, a transplant who left the Deep South, or a collector building a run of Cram's 1883 atlas maps. It also makes a fitting housewarming, birthday, or anniversary gift. Every print ships unframed and is available in multiple sizes.