Michigan & Wisconsin Map 1882 Township Print - Lansing, Detroit, Madison, Milwaukee

Samuel Augustus Mitchell Jr., working through Wm. M. Bradley & Bro. of Philadelphia, issued this Michigan and Wisconsin sheet in 1882, part of his New General Atlas published in 1886. This printing is hand-colored, combining both states on a single sheet at a genuine county-and-township scale, tracking two Great Lakes states whose lumber and mining economies had, by the early 1880s, drawn settlement well into their northern reaches. The sheet maps Michigan and Wisconsin jointly, showing settlements, railroads, and rivers across a region shaped as much by its lake shorelines as by its interior farmland.

County and township boundaries are laid out in fine detail across both states, a granular administrative view spanning from Michigan's Lower Peninsula up into its remote Upper Peninsula, and across Wisconsin's own lake-bounded territory. Railroads thread through both states, a network built to move lumber and ore out of the northern forests and mines toward Great Lakes ports. Rivers and lake shorelines round out the geography, tracing a landscape organized as much around water transport as rail. Together the counties, the railroads, and the lakeshores sketch two states whose settled core still gave way to sparsely populated northern timber country.

For a Michigan or Wisconsin family with late-19th-century roots, or a collector building out the two states' maps across the decades, this sheet has a specific pull. The store also carries Michigan and Wisconsin separately from Cram's 1893 and 1883 editions, and combined with Iowa in Rogers & Johnston's earlier 1857 sheet elsewhere in this collection; this 1882 Mitchell sheet is the only one in the store to pair Michigan and Wisconsin alone on a single county-level map. It's printed unframed and available in a range of sizes to fit whatever wall it's headed for.