New York Map 1878 Railroad Print - Albany, New York City, Buffalo

George Franklin Cram, working from his Western Map Depot in Chicago, published this Rail Road and County Map of New York in 1878 as part of his Standard American Atlas of the United States, a hand-colored sheet with county boundaries marked in red across a state whose commercial infrastructure was, by this date, among the most developed anywhere in the country. This printing comes from the atlas's rare original run, mapping New York's canals, railroads, and rivers together on a single plate. New York appears here as the country's commercial gateway between the eastern seaboard and the Great Lakes, its rail lines by this date largely paralleling a canal route that had opened the state's interior to trade half a century earlier.

Albany anchors the map as the state capital, positioned on the Hudson River at the eastern terminus of the Erie Canal, a location that made it the natural seat of government for a state organized increasingly around water and rail transport. New York City appears at the Hudson's mouth as the nation's largest port, its dominance only reinforced by the flow of goods the canal and, by this date, the railroads funneled toward it. Buffalo sits at the canal's western terminus on Lake Erie, a city whose rapid growth over the preceding half-century had been driven almost entirely by its position at that junction. The Adirondack Mountains rise across the state's northern interior, and together the capital, the two terminal cities, and the mountains trace a state whose transportation network had made it the busiest commercial corridor in the country.

Hudson Valley, canal-town, and upstate New York roots will all find something recognizable on this sheet, and it suits a collector marking the state's rail network at the height of its 19th-century commercial dominance. The store also carries New York as part of the nine-state northeastern combination in Rogers & Johnston's earlier 1857 sheet, a much broader regional view than this dedicated state portrait; this 1878 Cram sheet is the only edition in the collection to map New York entirely on its own. It's printed unframed and available in a range of sizes to fit whatever wall it's headed for.