Pennsylvania in 1856 - Philadelphia, Harrisburg, Pittsburgh

J.H. Colton & Company issued this plan of Philadelphia in 1856 as part of Colton's Atlas of the World, the same debut world atlas that carried the firm's Baltimore and Washington plates, credited to G.W. Colton and printed in the scarcer one-volume edition bound after the atlas's original subscription run. The Philadelphia sheet carries the same ornate decorative border found across Colton's early city plans, bordering a full-color plate whose pastel wash divides the city into unreferenced numbered regions, mirroring the numbering system Colton used on his Baltimore plan the same year, without a printed key to explain the divisions on the sheet itself. By the mid-1850s Philadelphia was one of the largest and most commercially important cities in the country, its port trade on the Delaware River driving the kind of sustained growth this plan's dense street grid was engraved to track.

The Delaware River runs along the city's eastern edge, depicted with small ship illustrations that emphasize Philadelphia's role as a major port at a time when the river carried much of the city's commercial trade. The numbered regions divide the built-up city into sections whose color washes make growth patterns legible even without a printed key, the same shorthand approach Colton applied to his other major American city plans that same year. Philadelphia's grid of streets, based on William Penn's original colonial-era plan, is rendered with the fine engraved line work typical of Colton's decorative house style, a level of detail that distinguished his debut atlas from cheaper contemporary competitors. Together the river commerce and the enduring Penn grid capture a mid-1850s Philadelphia balancing its colonial-era layout against rapid new industrial growth.

This plan is a strong choice for a Philadelphia family whose roots reach back before the Civil War, a Pennsylvania transplant drawn to the city's colonial-era street grid, or a collector building a set of pre-war Colton atlas city plates. The Vault also carries Philadelphia as mapped by O.W. Gray in 1873 and jointly with Camden by the Huber firm in 1890; as the earliest of the three, this 1856 Colton edition predates both the Centennial-era growth Gray's plan anticipates and the ferry-linked Camden pairing found in the later Huber sheet. It's available unframed in a full range of sizes, from a compact study print to a larger statement piece.