Colorado in 1886 - Denver, Pueblo, Colorado Springs

George F. Cram issued this railroad and county map of Colorado in a rare early edition of his Standard American Railway Atlas, published in Chicago in 1886, a decade after Colorado's admission to the Union. Cram's firm had grown into one of the country's leading commercial atlas publishers through its use of the cerographic wax-engraving process, which allowed rapid updates to reflect newly organized counties and fast-changing railroad networks, an especially important capability in a mining state where new lines and towns appeared almost yearly. The map's county configuration allows it to be dated with real precision, showing Archuleta County, formed in 1885, while Logan and Washington counties, both established in 1887, are not yet present.

Counties, railroads, railway stations, township surveys, mountains, rivers, and lakes fill the sheet in dense detail, along with county seats and Money Order Post Offices, a level of commercial infrastructure rarely mapped so precisely by other atlas publishers of the period. Denver anchors the Front Range as the state capital and rail hub, while Pueblo and Colorado Springs mark the growing industrial and resort towns further south along the Arkansas River corridor, all connected by the expanding web of narrow and standard gauge lines threading through the Rockies. The map's careful dating window, between Archuleta County's creation and the addition of Logan and Washington counties a year later, makes it a genuinely useful reference for tracking Colorado's rapid county-level reorganization during the 1880s.

This map is a fine gift for a family with Colorado roots, for a transplant now settled along the Front Range, or for a collector of 1880s railroad atlases of the Rocky Mountain states. It is offered unframed in a range of sizes.