Michigan in 1875 - Detroit, Lansing, Grand Rapids

This map of Michigan was published in 1875 by George Franklin Cram's Cram Atlas Company of Chicago and New York, part of the firm's New Commercial Atlas of the United States and Territories, remembered today as the rarest and most attractive of Cram's atlas series. Unlike Cram's later mass-produced volumes, this large folio sheet is finished in full hand-painted color by county rather than machine-printed tints, with the state's railroad lines and its grid of congressional townships marked out in careful detail at a scale of nineteen miles to the inch. It covers the state of Michigan in its entirety, both peninsulas included. By 1875 Michigan was in the midst of a lumber and mining boom, its forests and copper and iron ranges being opened up county by county through the rapid extension of the rail network this map was designed to record.

Detroit, on the strait connecting Lake Erie and Lake St. Clair, was already established as Michigan's largest city and its principal center of trade and shipbuilding. Lansing, chosen as the state capital in 1847 in part for its central, inland position, anchored the growing network of rail lines this atlas was built to chart. Grand Rapids, on the Grand River in the western part of the state, was emerging as a furniture-manufacturing center drawing on the hardwood forests of the surrounding countryside. Further north, the state's Lower Peninsula pine forests were being cleared at a furious pace to supply lumber to a rapidly building Midwest, while its Upper Peninsula copper and iron ranges were only beginning to be fully exploited. Together these industries defined Michigan's township-by-township growth in the years this map records.

This map makes a fitting gift for anyone with roots in Michigan's Lower Peninsula or ties to Detroit, Lansing, or Grand Rapids, or for a collector drawn to the hand-colored township atlases of the 1870s railroad boom. Buyers assembling a Michigan collection should note we also carry the state as mapped by Colton in 1855, by Rand McNally in 1879, and the northern Lake Superior region separately by both Gray in 1874 and Rand McNally in 1879; this 1875 Cram edition is distinguished by its full hand-painted county color and its focus on the state's rail and township grid. It is available unframed in a full range of sizes, from a compact study print to a larger statement piece.