Louisiana in 1889 - New Orleans, Baton Rouge, Lafayette

Rand McNally & Company published this highly detailed map of Louisiana from Chicago in 1889, by which point the firm, founded in 1856 as a Chicago print shop for railway tickets and timetables, had grown into one of the country's leading commercial mapmakers through its pioneering use of wax engraving, a cheaper process that let it undercut competitors still reliant on costly steel engraving while still producing sharply detailed maps. The sheet packs in an unusually dense layer of parish boundaries, towns, railroads, and lakes, reflecting both the firm's origins in railway publishing and the late-1880s boom in rail construction across the postwar South. It captures Louisiana two years before Rand McNally would begin dominating the American atlas market outright with its Business Atlas, at a moment when the state's rail network had finally recovered and expanded well past its antebellum extent. The map's businesslike density over decorative flourish is typical of Rand McNally's house style, built for practical reference rather than parlor display.

New Orleans remains Louisiana's rail and river hub on this later sheet, its lines fanning out to reach parishes that had no railroad access at all before the war. Baton Rouge continues to anchor the map politically as the state capital, its own rail connections by 1889 finally linking it directly to the rest of the state's expanding network. Lafayette, in the Acadiana parishes of south-central Louisiana, appears as a growing rail and market town serving the Cajun prairie country, a region whose French-Catholic culture set it apart from the plantation parishes further east. The density of railroad lines crossing the map compared to the antebellum Louisiana sheets in this collection is itself a record of how completely the state's transportation geography had been rebuilt in the quarter-century since the Civil War.

This 1889 Rand McNally edition is well suited to a Louisiana family with Acadiana or south-central roots, a New Orleans transplant, or a collector tracking the state's late-19th-century rail expansion. It is the most recent of the store's seven Louisiana maps and the only one from a firm that built its reputation on railway publishing rather than the decorative folio atlas tradition of Colton, Gray, or Morse. It is available unframed in a full range of sizes, from a compact study print to a large wall-scale piece.