Minnesota in 1893 - Minneapolis, St. Paul, Duluth

Wood Brothers Cash Store of Unadilla, New York, handed this map out to customers in 1893 as part of a promotional atlas commissioned from Chicago publisher George F. Cram, a marketing giveaway tied to that year's Columbian Exposition in Chicago, which marked the 400th anniversary of Columbus's landing in the New World. The full volume, bound in brown cloth with a gilt-stamped title, ran to 194 pages and ninety state and territory maps; this sheet is the one devoted to Minnesota.

The Minnesota map is an outline map with hand-applied color marking every county in red, along with the state's cities and towns as they stood in 1893. An inset in the corner zooms in on Cook County, the rugged northeastern tip of the state along Lake Superior, giving a closer look at a region too remote and sparsely settled to render clearly at the main map's scale of 1:2,300,000. Reference lines run to both the Greenwich and Washington prime meridians, and the sheet also carries printed figures for the state's population and total area in square miles, a snapshot of Minnesota as it stood a full five years before the twentieth century began.

A print like this suits anyone with Minnesota roots, a family that farmed near one of these county seats generations back, a transplant who left the state and wants a piece of it on the wall, or a collector working through Cram's state-by-state series one sheet at a time. It also makes a fitting housewarming, anniversary, or birthday gift for a Minnesotan. TheMapVault already carries a general Minnesota Historical Map Vintage Print, but this listing is different: it's the actual 1893 Cram Columbian World's Fair Atlas map, with its Cook County inset and World's Fair provenance, not a generic reproduction. Every print ships unframed and is offered in multiple sizes, so you can pick the scale that fits your wall.