Virginia & West Virginia Map 1878 Railroad Print - Richmond, Wheeling, Norfolk

George Franklin Cram, working from his Western Map Depot in Chicago, published this Rail Road and County Map of Virginia and West Virginia in 1878 as part of his Standard American Atlas of the United States, a hand-colored sheet with county boundaries marked in red across both states. This printing comes from the atlas's rare original run, drawn as West Virginia, separated from Virginia during the Civil War, continued establishing its own institutions well into its second decade as a state entirely distinct from its parent. The sheet records both states still working through the political and administrative reorganization that the 1863 split and the war's aftermath had forced upon them, a full fifteen years after the two states first divided from one another at the height of the war.

Richmond anchors Virginia's side of the sheet as that state's capital, a city still rebuilding from the war's destruction more than a decade after Appomattox. Wheeling appears as West Virginia's capital, a role it held through most of the 1870s and 1880s before the seat of government later moved elsewhere. Norfolk sits on the Chesapeake Bay as Virginia's principal port, while the Shenandoah Valley's agricultural corridor runs through the state's interior between the two capitals. The Potomac River separates Virginia from the states to its north and the Ohio River forms West Virginia's northwestern border, and together the two capitals and two river borders trace a region still reorganizing itself after the war and the state split alike.

This sheet documents a genuinely specific chapter in both states' history, one a Virginia or West Virginia family with roots dating to this Reconstruction-era reorganization will recognize, and it suits a collector tracking how the two states were mapped separately after their 1863 split. The store also carries Virginia combined with North Carolina in an undated antique reproduction and Virginia as part of the eight-state Mid-Atlantic and Ohio Valley combination in Rogers & Johnston's earlier 1857 sheet, printed before West Virginia existed as its own state at all; this 1878 sheet is the only edition in the collection to pair Virginia specifically with the newly separate West Virginia. It's printed unframed and available in a range of sizes to fit whatever wall it's headed for.