Missouri in 1893 - St. Louis, Kansas City, New Madrid

At 31 by 22 centimeters and a scale of 1:2,000,000, the Missouri sheet from George Cram's 1893 Columbian World's Fair Atlas is a fairly compact map that still manages to pack in two separate insets alongside the statewide view. The atlas as a whole was produced for Wood Brothers Cash Store of Unadilla, New York, as a giveaway tied to that year's Chicago World's Fair, and the engraving itself carries the imprint of the Columbian World's Fair Atlas Co., the same firm credited across every sheet in the volume.

County boundaries are marked in red outline coloring across the state, and the map includes dedicated insets of St. Louis and New Madrid, the former for its standing as Missouri's major urban and river hub, the latter for its notoriety as the site of the early nineteenth century's most severe recorded earthquakes. Railroads and rivers are both threaded across the county grid, reflecting the transportation networks that tied the state's towns together in the early 1890s, and the level of engraving detail is typical of the care Cram's firm put into every map bound into the atlas.

This map is a good choice for a Missouri family, someone who's since moved elsewhere, or a collector adding to a shelf of Cram's 1893 state maps. It's available unframed and in multiple sizes, whether the occasion calls for a housewarming, an anniversary, or a birthday gift.