Michigan in 1855 - Detroit, Lansing, Grand Rapids

This map of Michigan was drawn by G.W. Colton and published by J.H. Colton & Co. of New York, appearing within Colton's General Atlas, an engraved series renowned for the fine detail and accuracy of its cartography. The sheet is bordered with an intricate scrollwork design typical of Colton's decorative style, its counties tinted in soft pastel pinks and greens and its terrain rendered with hachures to suggest relief. It covers the state of Michigan, tracing its counties and settlements around the Great Lakes shoreline. Michigan had been admitted to the Union less than two decades earlier, in 1837, and by the mid-1850s remained a young state whose interior was only beginning to be organized into counties and townships ahead of the great railroad expansion still to come.

Lake Michigan and Lake Huron are both prominently shown bordering the state, their combined shoreline defining Michigan's distinctive two-handed shape and its dependence on lake shipping for trade with the rest of the Midwest. Detroit, on the strait linking Lake Erie to Lake St. Clair, was already the state's largest city and its principal gateway for settlers and goods moving west. Lansing, newly chosen as the state capital in 1847, was still a small inland town built almost from nothing at the center of the state. Grand Rapids, on the Grand River, was only beginning its rise as a furniture and lumber town drawing on the hardwood forests nearby. Together these places sketch Michigan on the cusp of the rapid growth that would transform it over the following decades.

This map makes a fitting gift for anyone with roots in Michigan or an interest in the state's early years as a young member of the Union, or for a collector drawn to the fine engraving of Colton's mid-century atlases. Buyers assembling a Michigan collection should note we also carry the state as mapped later by Cram in 1875 and by Rand McNally in 1879, both focused on the state's mature railroad network; this 1855 Colton edition is by contrast the earliest of the group, capturing Michigan while it was still a frontier state finding its shape. It is available unframed in a full range of sizes, from a compact study print to a larger statement piece.