Delaware, Maryland, Virginia and West Virginia in 1874 - Wilmington, Baltimore, Richmond, Charleston

This four-state sheet comes from Asher & Adams' New Commercial, Topographical, and Statistical Atlas and Gazetteer of the United States, published in New York in 1874, one of the first American atlases built exclusively around railroad lines rather than general topography. By 1874, West Virginia had existed as a separate state for barely a decade, carved out of Virginia in 1863 when its mountain counties refused to follow the rest of the state into secession — and mapping it here alongside Delaware, Maryland, and Virginia captures the four states just as Reconstruction-era railroad rebuilding was finally reconnecting a region the Civil War had torn through only a few years earlier. Engraved and electrotyped at the Franklin Type Foundry, the map is hand-colored with relief shown by hachures.

Delaware, Maryland, Virginia, and West Virginia share a single map here, distances along the rail network marked out across all four states in the atlas's signature commercial style — a practical reference for postwar merchants and travelers navigating a rail system still being rebuilt from wartime damage.

This suits a Mid-Atlantic family well, a transplant who's kept ties to the region, or a collector of Gilded Age railroad atlases. It also pairs naturally with our separate 1838 Bradford-era sheets for Maryland, Delaware, and Virginia, which show the same states nearly forty years earlier and decades before West Virginia even existed as its own state. The print is unframed and available in multiple sizes.