New Mexico in 1882 - Santa Fe, Albuquerque, Las Cruces

This map of New Mexico was published in 1882 by George Franklin Cram of Chicago as part of Cram's Unrivaled Family Atlas of the World, issued under the title New Rail Road and County Map of New Mexico. This edition is notable among Cram's early work for its hand coloring and oval title cartouche, a treatment the publisher used only in this first printing before switching to machine-printed color the following year to keep the atlas affordable. The sheet covers New Mexico while it remained a federal territory, thirty years before statehood arrived in 1912, recording counties, towns, and the railroad lines that were then driving a wave of settlement, ranching, and mining investment into a region still governed from Washington rather than from a state capital of its own.

Santa Fe, the territorial capital and the oldest seat of government in the country, anchored New Mexico's administration at the northern end of the old Santa Fe Trail. Albuquerque, newly reshaped by the arrival of the Atchison, Topeka and Santa Fe Railway just a few years before this map was printed, was fast becoming the territory's commercial hub. Las Cruces, further south along the Rio Grande, served the irrigated farmland of the Mesilla Valley, while Silver City, in the mountains near the territory's southwestern corner, grew on the strength of nearby silver and copper mining. Together these towns trace a territory whose growth followed the river valleys and the new rail lines threading through them.

This map makes a fitting gift for anyone with family roots along the Rio Grande in Santa Fe, Albuquerque, or Las Cruces, or for a collector interested in the railroad-era maps of the American territorial Southwest. New Mexico buyers should note we also carry the territory as mapped by Cram and Davis in 1909: this 1882 edition, hand colored and printed just as the railroad was reshaping the territory, offers an earlier and rarer view than the later machine-colored state atlas issue. It is available unframed in a full range of sizes, from a compact study print to a larger statement piece.