Minnesota in 1874 - St. Paul, Minneapolis, Duluth, Lake County

This map of Minnesota was published in 1874 by Asher & Adams of New York within their New Commercial, Topographical, and Statistical Atlas and Gazetteer of the United States, one of the first American atlases built specifically around railroad lines rather than conventional topography. The sheet is a hand-colored engraving that deliberately pares back physical detail in favor of marking distances along the rail network and the townships and settlements strung along it, and includes a separate inset detailing the northeastern portion of Lake County. It covers the state of Minnesota in full. Minnesota had been admitted to the Union only sixteen years earlier, in 1858, and by 1874 was in the midst of an intense wave of railroad-driven settlement, its prairie and forest lands being surveyed into farms and towns as fast as the rail lines could reach them.

St. Paul, seated on the Mississippi River, was Minnesota's capital and its principal commercial gateway, the point at which river and rail traffic met to move the state's growing agricultural output east. Minneapolis, just upstream, was rapidly emerging as a milling powerhouse, its falls on the Mississippi harnessed to grind the wheat pouring in from the surrounding prairie. Duluth, at the western tip of Lake Superior, was only beginning its rise as a lake port, its rail connections to the interior still being built out in the years this atlas records. Lake County, singled out for its own inset, points to the mineral and timber interests already drawing attention to the state's rugged northeastern corner. Together these places capture Minnesota mid-transformation, moving from frontier territory to an agricultural and milling powerhouse within a single generation.

This map makes a fitting gift for anyone with roots in St. Paul, Minneapolis, or Minnesota's Iron Range country, or for a collector interested in the sparse, railroad-focused atlases that charted the settlement of the American prairie. Buyers should note we also carry Minnesota at an earlier stage of its history, still organized as a territory and including parts of present-day North and South Dakota, on Mitchell and Young's 1859 map; this 1874 Asher & Adams edition instead shows Minnesota well after statehood, its landscape being remade by rail; note this exact Asher & Adams edition is also offered elsewhere in our catalog under a different crop selection, so the underlying map and year are the same, only the image crops differ. It is available unframed in a full range of sizes, from a compact study print to a larger statement piece.