Michigan in 1874 - Detroit, Lansing, Grand Rapids

This Michigan map is part of Asher & Adams' New Commercial, Topographical, and Statistical Atlas and Gazetteer of the United States, published in New York in 1874. By this point Michigan's Upper Peninsula — accepted grudgingly as compensation for losing the Toledo War border dispute back in 1836 — had turned into one of the richest copper and iron-mining regions in the country, a resource windfall nobody in Michigan had fully appreciated at the time of statehood. Franklin Type Foundry engraved and electrotyped the sheet, with an inset covering the northwestern portion of Michigan and townships and rail distances marked across the state.

The sheet reflects Michigan's rapidly expanding rail network in the years following the Civil War, tying the mineral wealth of the Upper Peninsula to the farms and growing cities of the Lower Peninsula.

This suits a Michigan family well, a Great Lakes transplant, or a collector of Gilded Age railroad atlases. Our 1838 Bradford sheet shows Michigan the year after statehood, before anyone had grasped what that reluctantly-accepted Upper Peninsula was actually worth. The print ships unframed and in multiple sizes.