Mississippi & Alabama Map 1878 Railroad Print - Jackson, Natchez, Montgomery, Mobile

George Franklin Cram, working from his Western Map Depot in Chicago, published this Rail Road and Township Map of Mississippi and Alabama in 1878 as part of his Standard American Atlas of the United States, a large-folio sheet pairing the two Deep South states on a single hand-colored plate with township boundaries marked in red. This printing comes from the atlas's rare original run, produced as both states worked to rebuild their railroads and economies following the formal end of Reconstruction the previous year, when the last federal troops were withdrawn from the South. The sheet records a cotton belt whose plantation economy, though reorganized after emancipation, still depended on the same river and rail corridors that had carried its trade before the war.

Jackson anchors the Mississippi side of the sheet as that state's capital. Natchez sits on the Mississippi River bluffs to the southwest, a once-wealthy river town whose fortunes had faded from their antebellum peak. Montgomery, Alabama's capital, appears along the state's rail network to the east, and Mobile anchors the Gulf coast as the state's only significant port, its harbor still the outlet for cotton grown across both states' interiors. The Alabama and Tombigbee rivers converge toward Mobile while the Mississippi River forms the western edge of the sheet, and together the two capitals and two river towns trace a cotton economy still rebuilding its transportation network a decade after the war's end.

Descendants of the Reconstruction-era cotton counties in either Mississippi or Alabama will recognize plenty on this sheet, and it suits a collector tracking how the Deep South's rail network was rebuilt state by state. The store also carries Mississippi paired with Louisiana in Rogers & Johnston's 1857 sheet, drawn well before the war reshaped either state's economy, and Alabama grouped with Georgia, South Carolina, and Florida in Asher & Adams' 1883 sheet, a later, four-state view quite different in scope from this closer pairing; this 1878 map is the only edition in the collection to pair Mississippi and Alabama alone. It's printed unframed and available in a range of sizes to fit whatever wall it's headed for.