Kansas in 1893 - Topeka, Wichita, Dodge City

The Kansas map in George Cram's 1893 Columbian World's Fair Atlas measures 31 by 24 centimeters and is printed at a scale of 1:2,500,000, one of several state maps in the volume sharing that same broad scale. The atlas was produced for Wood Brothers Cash Store of Unadilla, New York, and distributed to customers as a keepsake tied to the Chicago World's Fair that year, engraved and printed by the Columbian World's Fair Atlas Co., the same house responsible for every map in the book.

County boundaries are marked in red across the state, with both Greenwich and Washington used as prime meridians along the sheet's borders, a dual system common throughout the atlas. Railroads are drawn prominently across the county grid, a reflection of how central rail transport was to settlement and trade on the Kansas plains in the late nineteenth century, and rivers are picked out to round out the state's physical geography, giving the sheet a fuller picture of the state's infrastructure than its modest scale might suggest.

It's a fitting gift for a Kansas family, someone who's since left the state, or a collector working through Cram's full 1893 series. If you already have our 1930s vintage Kansas state map, this one sits four decades earlier, an 1893 Cram atlas view rather than a twentieth-century sheet. Sold unframed and offered in multiple sizes, it's an easy pick for a housewarming or birthday gift.