{"product_id":"michigan-in-1877-detroit-lansing-ann-arbor","title":"Michigan in 1877 - Detroit, Lansing, Ann Arbor","description":"\u003cp\u003eSamuel Augustus Mitchell Jr. issued this plan of Detroit in 1877 as plate 41 of Mitchell's New General Atlas, engraved by W.H. Gamble for the Philadelphia firm's eighty-three-map edition, which that year also introduced a set of new biblical and Roman Empire maps alongside its American city plans. The Detroit plate carries the same ornate floral border Mitchell's engravers used across the atlas, bordering a full-color plan whose wash of pastel tones separates the city's numbered wards, a lithographic technique that let Gamble render both decorative flourish and administrative precision on a single small sheet. By 1877 Detroit was in the middle of a sustained industrial expansion, its position on the river connecting Lakes Erie and Huron making it an increasingly important manufacturing and trade hub in the years before the automobile industry would remake the city entirely. The plan's careful attention to wards and rail lines reflects a city already organizing itself for the growth still to come.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eThe Detroit River defines the plan's southern boundary, the strategic waterway that had made the city a vital link in Great Lakes trade and that this sheet foregrounds even as it fills the surrounding grid with block-by-block ward detail. Railroads are marked prominently across the plan, evidence of the rail infrastructure that was fast becoming as important to Detroit's economy as the river trade itself, tying the city into the wider network of Midwestern industry. The wards themselves are numbered and color-coded, a system used for municipal governance rather than visitor navigation, and their density across the plan traces how far the city's built footprint had already spread by the late 1870s. Together the river, the railroads, and the ward grid capture Detroit on the cusp of its transformation into one of the country's major industrial centers.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eThis plan suits a Detroit family with roots in the city's industrial rise, a Michigan transplant who has recently returned home, or a collector filling out a run of Mitchell atlas city plates from the 1870s. The Vault also carries Detroit as mapped by the George F. Cram Company in 1925; where that later plan records a fully modern, automobile-era city with named districts like Highland Park and Hamtramck already incorporated, this 1877 Mitchell edition captures Detroit a full half-century earlier, still organized strictly by ward rather than by the neighborhoods that would come to define it. It's available unframed in a full range of sizes, from a compact study print to a larger statement piece.\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"TheMapVault","offers":[{"title":"16x20 inch - UNFRAMED","offer_id":58529697071435,"sku":"1776-16x20","price":25.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true},{"title":"A2 (42x60cm) - UNFRAMED","offer_id":58529697104203,"sku":"1776-A2","price":25.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true},{"title":"18x24 inch - UNFRAMED","offer_id":58529697136971,"sku":"1776-18x24","price":25.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true},{"title":"50x70 cm - UNFRAMED","offer_id":58529697169739,"sku":"1776-50x70","price":30.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true},{"title":"A1 (60x84cm) - UNFRAMED","offer_id":58529697202507,"sku":"1776-A1","price":40.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true},{"title":"24x32 inch - UNFRAMED","offer_id":58529697235275,"sku":"1776-24x32","price":40.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true},{"title":"70x100 cm - UNFRAMED","offer_id":58529697268043,"sku":"1776-70x100","price":50.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true},{"title":"75x100 cm - UNFRAMED","offer_id":58529697300811,"sku":"1776-75x100","price":50.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true},{"title":"A0 (84x119cm) - UNFRAMED","offer_id":58529697333579,"sku":"1776-A0","price":55.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0907\/2456\/5323\/files\/SKU1776.jpg?v=1789780018","url":"https:\/\/www.themapvault.com\/products\/michigan-in-1877-detroit-lansing-ann-arbor","provider":"TheMapVault","version":"1.0","type":"link"}