Nebraska Map 1878 Railroad Print - Omaha, Lincoln, Grand Island

George Franklin Cram published this Rail Road and Township Map of Nebraska in 1878, part of his Standard American Atlas of the United States, printed by his Western Map Depot in Chicago at a scale of 19 miles to the inch. This printing is hand-colored with township and county divisions marked in red, and carries inset maps alongside the main statewide sheet. The sheet maps Nebraska statewide, showing railroads, towns, and townships across a state whose settlement had, by the late 1870s, been driven overwhelmingly by its rail-fueled homesteading boom.

Railroad lines crisscross the state on this sheet, connecting its major towns and cities in a network that had become central to Nebraska's economy and settlement pattern by 1878. Townships and counties are both marked in red, a dual administrative layer showing how the state's land was divided both for local governance and for individual settler claims. The inset maps add supplementary detail the main statewide view doesn't have room to include. Together the railroads, the township and county grid, and the insets sketch a state whose rapid settlement in the 1870s was inseparable from its expanding rail lines.

For a Nebraska family with late-19th-century homesteading roots, or a collector building out the state's maps across the decades, this sheet has a specific pull. The store also carries Nebraska from Cram's own later 1893 and 1883 editions, Asher & Adams' 1874 atlas, Mitchell's 1884 sheet, and Rogers & Johnston's earlier 1857 territorial sheet, all elsewhere in this collection; this 1878 Cram railroad-and-township sheet is the earliest Cram edition of Nebraska in the store, built specifically around the state's township grid rather than general reference detail. It's printed unframed and available in a range of sizes to fit whatever wall it's headed for.