Pennsylvania in 1893 - Philadelphia, Pittsburgh, Harrisburg

By 1893, Chicago's World's Columbian Exposition had become the biggest story in American public life, and George Cram's Columbian World's Fair Atlas rode that wave into thousands of households by way of Wood Brothers Cash Store, a general store in Unadilla, New York, that used the atlas as a customer premium. Pennsylvania, as one of the country's most populous and industrially significant states, earned a full two-page spread in the volume.

Printed at a scale of 1:1,300,000, the Pennsylvania map uses outline hand coloring to mark county lines in red and hachures to suggest the state's mountainous interior. Philadelphia and Pittsburgh anchor the eastern and western ends of the map, with Lake Erie clipping the northwest corner and railroad lines threading between the state's industrial centers. Both Greenwich and Washington serve as prime meridians, consistent with the rest of the atlas.

It suits a Pennsylvania family building a wall of state history, someone who's since left for another part of the country, or a collector picking up Cram's full run of 1893 maps one state at a time. If you've already picked up one of our vintage Pennsylvania county-map prints, this sheet is a different scale of thing entirely, a single statewide 1893 Cram atlas view rather than a county-level map. It's offered unframed and in multiple sizes, ready for a housewarming or an anniversary gift.