North Carolina in 1893 - Raleigh, Charlotte, Asheville

By 1893, George F. Cram's Chicago firm had built a name for detailed, accurate state cartography, and the Columbian World's Fair Atlas stands as one of its more ambitious projects: ninety maps covering the whole of the United States, printed to mark that year's World's Fair and distributed through outlets like Wood Brothers Cash Store in Unadilla, New York. This sheet, devoted to North Carolina, is one of those ninety maps.

The North Carolina map uses the atlas's standard outline hand coloring, with red lines dividing the state's counties and isolines used to suggest depth along its long Atlantic coastline. An inset focuses in on the western end of the state, giving a clearer view of the mountainous counties that the main map's scale of 1:2,300,000 can't render in full detail. Both the Greenwich and Washington prime meridians are noted, consistent with the rest of the atlas, and the sheet captures North Carolina's coast-to-mountains geography in one compact view.

It's a fitting print for a North Carolina family tracing its roots back to a particular county, for someone who's since left the state and wants a reminder of home, or for a collector adding to a set of Cram's 1893 state maps. TheMapVault's existing North Carolina – Old Map listing is a different, general print; this one is specifically the 1893 Cram Columbian World's Fair Atlas sheet, with its western inset and World's Fair pedigree. It also makes a fitting housewarming or birthday gift for a North Carolinian. As with all our prints, it ships unframed and is available in several sizes.