North Carolina and South Carolina in 1874 - Raleigh, Charlotte, Columbia, Charleston

This joint North Carolina and South Carolina map comes from Asher & Adams' New Commercial, Topographical, and Statistical Atlas and Gazetteer of the United States, published in New York in 1874. South Carolina in particular was still under Reconstruction-era Republican government at the time this map was printed, one of the last Southern states where that held true, its politics as unsettled as its rebuilt rail lines — the same lines shown here stitching the two Carolinas back together less than a decade after Sherman's march had torn directly through both states. An inset covering the western portion of North Carolina accompanies the main map, engraved and electrotyped at the Franklin Type Foundry.

The sheet documents the rail network connecting the two Carolinas, part of the most complete late-1874 edition of the atlas — a practical commercial map for a region still working through the political and economic aftershocks of Reconstruction.

Carolina natives on either side of the state line tend to want this one, a transplant who's kept regional ties, or a collector of 19th-century railroad atlases. Our 1838 Bradford sheets for North Carolina and South Carolina separately show both states a full generation earlier, well before the war and Reconstruction reshaped them. The print ships unframed and in multiple sizes.