Michigan in 1893 - Detroit, Grand Rapids, Lansing

George F. Cram built his reputation in Chicago as one of the more prolific American mapmakers of the late nineteenth century, and the 1893 Columbian World's Fair Atlas represents some of his firm's most complete work: ninety maps covering every state and territory, produced to coincide with the Chicago World's Fair and distributed for Wood Brothers Cash Store of Unadilla, New York. This is the Michigan map from that atlas, engraved and hand-colored the same year the fair opened its gates on the shore of Lake Michigan.

Cram's engravers laid out Michigan's two peninsulas in full, with county lines picked out in red and isolines used to suggest depth along the Great Lakes shoreline. Detroit, Grand Rapids, and Lansing are all labeled, reflecting the state's principal population centers as they stood in 1893, and the sheet carries printed totals for population and area in square miles alongside the geography. The map runs to a scale of 1:2,500,000 and is keyed to the Greenwich prime meridian, giving a broad but legible view of a state defined as much by water as by land.

This is the kind of print a Michigander who's since moved out of state tends to want above a desk or in a hallway, and it works just as well as a gift for someone celebrating a move back, a retirement, or simply a birthday with a nod to home. Collectors assembling a full run of Cram's 1893 state maps will also want this one to round out the set. It ships unframed, printed to order in a choice of sizes, so it can be sized to whatever wall it's going on.