Oregon & Washington Map 1884 Township Print - Salem, Portland, Olympia, Seattle

Samuel Augustus Mitchell Jr., working through Wm. M. Bradley & Bro. of Philadelphia, issued this Oregon and Washington sheet in 1884, part of his New General Atlas published in 1886. This printing is hand-colored with relief shown through hachures, combining both territories on a single sheet at a genuine county-and-township scale, tracking a Pacific Northwest whose settlement had, by the mid-1880s, spread well beyond the Willamette Valley and Puget Sound's earliest towns. The sheet maps Oregon and Washington jointly, showing settlements, railroads, and rivers across the region.

County and township boundaries are laid out in fine detail across both territories, a granular administrative view spanning from Oregon's settled Willamette Valley up through Washington's own Puget Sound and interior counties. Railroads thread through the more developed portions of the region, a network still young compared to the rail systems further east but growing quickly through the 1880s. Rivers, including the Columbia system shared by both territories, are worked into the base map beneath the county and rail detail. Together the counties, the railroads, and the Columbia sketch a Pacific Northwest whose settlement was still concentrated along its river valleys and coastal sound.

For an Oregon or Washington family with late-19th-century roots, or a collector building out the region's maps across the decades, this sheet has a specific pull. The store also carries Oregon separately from Cram's 1893, 1883, and Asher & Adams' 1874 editions, and both territories combined in Rogers & Johnston's earlier 1857 sheet elsewhere in this collection; this 1884 Mitchell sheet is the only one of the group built around the region's fully surveyed county and township structure rather than its earlier, more sparsely organized territorial layout. It's printed unframed and available in a range of sizes to fit whatever wall it's headed for.