Delaware, Maryland, Virginia, and West Virginia in 1883 - Dover, Baltimore, Richmond, Charleston

This is the New Rail Road and County Map of Deleware (Delaware), Maryland, Virginia & West Virginia, 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's part of the first edition of Cram's first "mass production" world atlas, sixty-five maps produced for a broad American readership.

Likely printed by lithography, the sheet is set at a scale of about 1:2,220,000, with red delineating state borders and green tracing the railway network across all four states. Relief is suggested through minimal hachures, and county divisions are marked throughout, alongside rivers and other geographic features. West Virginia, shown here just twenty years into its existence as a state, had split off from Virginia during the Civil War when its mountain counties refused to secede along with the rest of the state, a fracture line the map's border between the two still traces. Two prime meridians, Greenwich and Washington, appear along the edges, standard references for American maps of the era.

This print suits anyone with roots in Delaware, Maryland, Virginia, or West Virginia, a family that worked the rail lines shown here, a transplant who left the Mid-Atlantic, 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.