Ohio in 1877 - Cincinnati, Columbus, Dayton

This map of Cincinnati was drawn by Frank A. Gray and copyrighted in 1877 by O.W. Gray & Son, appearing in this form in the 1884 special edition of The National Atlas, published by Stedman & Brown of Philadelphia. Gray's National Atlas was distinguished from the firm's smaller state atlases by enlarging many of its city maps to double-page size and adding new municipal plans, this Cincinnati sheet among them. The map is hand-painted in soft color to separate the city's neighborhoods and wards, a finishing technique that gives this Cincinnati view a more decorative, parlor-atlas character than the plainer working maps issued a decade earlier by the same Gray workshop. It covers Cincinnati, Ohio, at a moment when the city, having weathered the economic shock of the Panic of 1873, was still widely known as the Queen City of the West even as Chicago's faster growth was beginning to challenge its long-held position as the region's dominant commercial center.

Fairmount appears on the western edge of the city, a residential district climbing the hills above the basin. Spring Garden is shown to the north, a mixed industrial and residential quarter typical of Cincinnati's expanding ring of inner neighborhoods. Mount Auburn occupies high ground overlooking downtown, already established by the 1870s as one of the city's more desirable hillside addresses. The Ohio River curves along the southern boundary of the sheet, the waterway that first built Cincinnati's fortune, while Mill Creek runs north to south through the western part of the map, the industrial valley that anchored much of the city's manufacturing. Together these neighborhoods and waterways trace a city that had grown outward from its riverfront basin into the surrounding hills by the time this map was drawn.

This map suits a collector with family roots in Cincinnati's hillside neighborhoods, particularly Mount Auburn or Fairmount, or anyone piecing together the German and river-trade heritage of the Queen City. It is one of three Cincinnati maps in this collection: an 1868 first-edition plan by R.C. Phillips for the Atlas of the State of Ohio, an 1872 ward map drawn by Walling and Gray for the same atlas series, and this later, more decoratively finished 1877 Gray edition, each capturing the city at a different stage of its nineteenth-century growth. It is available unframed in a full range of sizes, from a compact study print to a larger statement piece.