Minnesota Map 1884 County Print - St. Paul, Minneapolis, Duluth

Samuel Augustus Mitchell Jr., working through Wm. M. Bradley & Bro. of Philadelphia, issued this Minnesota sheet in 1884, part of his New General Atlas published in 1886. This printing is hand-colored, its counties shaded distinctly across a state whose settlement had, by the 1880s, spread well beyond the Mississippi River corridor and into its northern timber country. The sheet maps Minnesota statewide, showing settlements, rivers, and railroads across a state anchored by the Twin Cities and the Lake Superior port at Duluth.

Minnesota's counties are laid out across the sheet in Mitchell's characteristic style, a settlement pattern still concentrated toward the state's southern and eastern reaches even as rail lines reached further north. Lake Superior anchors the state's northeastern corner, the harbor at Duluth already established as a major shipping point for the region's grain and lumber. Railroads and rivers round out the sheet's infrastructure, tracing the routes that connected the state's interior farm counties to its river and lake ports. Together the counties, the lake, and the rail network sketch a state whose economy by 1884 depended on both its farmland and its northern timber and shipping trade, a balance that had only grown more pronounced as Duluth's grain elevators and lumber mills expanded through the decade.

For a Minnesota family with late-19th-century roots, or a collector building out the state's maps across the decades, this sheet has a specific pull. The store also carries Minnesota from Cram's 1893 edition; this 1884 Mitchell sheet is an earlier county-level view of the state, predating Cram's later, more general reference edition by nearly a decade. It's printed unframed and available in a range of sizes to fit whatever wall it's headed for.