Nevada Map 1878 Railroad Print - Las Vegas, Reno, Carson City

George Franklin Cram, working from his Western Map Depot in Chicago, published this Rail Road and Township Map of Nevada in 1878 as part of his Standard American Atlas of the United States, a large-folio, hand-colored atlas produced as a business traveler's guide to the country's rail lines. This sheet belongs to the atlas's rare original printing, engraved from the same plates as Cram's smaller pocket editions and colored by county across a state whose county lines were still being redrawn as new mining districts opened. Nevada is mapped here just as the legendary Comstock Lode, the silver strike that had built the state and financed much of San Francisco's growth in the 1860s and early 1870s, was beginning its long decline from record annual output toward eventual exhaustion.

Carson City anchors the map as the state capital, chosen in the 1860s precisely for its proximity to the Comstock mines rather than for any agricultural or trade advantage. Virginia City appears just to its north as the mining town whose fortunes built the state, still one of the richest single settlements in the country even as the Lode's easy ore began running thin. Reno marks the crossing point of the Central Pacific Railroad and the Truckee River, a junction town whose importance would only grow as mining slowed. Beyond these three points, the map's county lines trace a vast, thinly settled basin-and-range landscape organized almost entirely around railroads and mining claims rather than farmland.

Nevada's mining counties still run deep in plenty of family histories, and this sheet catches the state at its economic turning point, making it equally suited to that buyer and to a collector tracking the Comstock boom through Nevada's changing maps. The store also carries Nevada in 1893 and 1883, both printed well after the Comstock had faded, along with an 1874 sheet pairing Southern California with Nevada and an 1884 edition combining Nevada with Utah; this 1878 map is the one that shows the boom still, barely, underway. It's printed unframed and available in a range of sizes to fit whatever wall it's headed for.