United States Map 1878 Railroad Print - New York, Chicago, Omaha, San Francisco

George Franklin Cram, working from his Western Map Depot in Chicago, published this Railroad Map of the United States and Territories in 1878 as the thirty-ninth and final plate in his Standard American Atlas of the United States, a large-folio, hand-colored atlas whose individual state sheets this map was designed to summarize in a single overview. Printed at the same nineteen-miles-to-the-inch scale used throughout the atlas, it was the sheet a reader would turn to after paging through the state-by-state maps, tying together a network that, taken piece by piece across thirty-eight prior plates, might otherwise be hard to see as a whole. The map records the country in 1878, the same year covered by every individual state sheet in the atlas, a decade after the Civil War's end and less than a decade after the transcontinental railroad first linked the Atlantic and Pacific coasts.

The map spans the full country from coast to coast, tracing the national railroad network as it stood at this exact moment: the transcontinental trunk lines completed in the previous decade, the dense eastern network radiating from Chicago and the major seaboard cities, and the thinner branch lines still pushing outward into the organized territories of the Mountain West. States and territories alike appear here at their 1878 boundaries. Colorado had only just entered the Union two years earlier, while the Dakota, Montana, Wyoming, Idaho, Arizona, New Mexico, and Washington territories still awaited admission. Read alongside the atlas's individual state sheets, the map ties together decades of separate railroad construction into a single connected system for the first time.

For a collector assembling Cram's full 1878 atlas or simply wanting the one sheet that summarizes the whole series, this overview map is the natural companion piece to any of the individual state sheets in the collection. The store carries whole-country maps from other eras too, including 1850 and 1928 editions, but this 1878 Cram overview is the only one drawn specifically as a companion to a state-by-state atlas rather than as a standalone reference. It's printed unframed and available in a range of sizes to fit whatever wall it's headed for.