Missouri in 1890 - St. Louis, Jefferson City, Kansas City

This map of St. Louis was copyrighted in 1887 by Wm. M. Bradley & Bro. and issued in this 1890 impression as part of Mitchell's New General Atlas, published by John Y. Huber & Co. of Philadelphia and St. Louis, and attributed to the veteran atlas-maker Samuel Augustus Mitchell. Mitchell's name had been attached to American general atlases since the 1830s, and by this 1890 edition the firm's reputation rested on the kind of dense reference volume this sheet comes from, ninety-three quarto maps bound together with statistical tables and post-office listings for the whole country. The map is hand-colored ward by ward in soft pink, green, and yellow, a coding scheme built for administrative legibility rather than ornament, giving the sheet a plainer, more workmanlike character than the elaborately bordered display atlases of the same decade. It covers St. Louis, Missouri, in a year when the city, still one of the largest in the country, was consolidating its position as the chief commercial gateway of the central Mississippi Valley even as it faced growing competition from Chicago to the north.

The Mississippi River is traced firmly along the city's eastern boundary, the waterway that had built St. Louis's fortune as a fur-trading outpost and steamboat port since its founding in the eighteenth century and that, by 1890, still anchored its identity even as rail traffic overtook river trade. Each numbered ward is set apart in its own pastel tint, a system that let the city's officials and voters read municipal boundaries at a glance in a period of rapid population growth and periodic annexation debate. Railroads radiate from the city in several directions, a reminder that by 1890 St. Louis had become one of the great rail hubs of the interior United States, its Union Station soon to open as one of the largest train stations in the world. The city's grid, denser near the river and looser toward its western edges, reflects a St. Louis still expanding outward from its original riverfront core toward the prairie beyond.

This map suits a collector with roots in a specific St. Louis ward, a Missouri transplant, or anyone assembling a record of the Mississippi River's great nineteenth-century port cities. Its plain, ward-by-ward coloring and its place within Mitchell's dense reference atlas set it apart from more decorative single-city maps of the period, offering instead a working administrative view of St. Louis at the height of its rail-era prominence. It is available unframed in a full range of sizes, from a compact study print to a larger statement piece.