Virginia in 1884 - Richmond, Henrico County, Petersburg

O.W. Gray and Frank A. Gray drew this new map of Richmond and Henrico County for Stedman & Brown's 1884 National Atlas, a Philadelphia-published volume built around the Grays' earlier Atlas of the United States and Continental Atlas but reworked with several city plans enlarged to full double-page spreads for this special edition. The Richmond sheet was finished in full hand-painted color rather than the simpler tinted outlines used on Gray's smaller state maps, a treatment the publishers reserved for the atlas's most important urban plans. The map covers the city of Richmond and surrounding Henrico County at a scale of roughly 1:12,000, less than two decades after the Civil War, during the Reconstruction-era rebuilding that was reshaping Richmond from a scarred former Confederate capital into a rapidly modernizing industrial center.

Richmond's wards are each painted in a distinct color across the sheet, laying out the administrative divisions that governed the city as it absorbed new residents and expanded its boundaries through the 1880s. The James River is drawn cutting through the plan, its falls and rapids the reason Richmond had been sited there in the first place and the source of the water power still driving the city's flour mills and ironworks. Henrico County surrounds the city proper on the map, its boundary marking where Richmond's urban grid gave way to the county's more rural land. Bridges crossing the James are marked linking the two, along with the railroad lines converging on the city that were central to its postwar recovery as a manufacturing and trading center.

This edition suits a Richmond or Henrico County family tracing roots through the Reconstruction era, or a Virginia collector who wants the earlier of the store's two Richmond maps alongside Cram's later 1899 Richmond and Manchester plan; where the Cram sheet documents Richmond's expansion across the James into Manchester at the turn of the century, this 1884 Gray edition captures the city fifteen years earlier, still rebuilding within its older boundaries. It is available unframed in a full range of sizes, from a compact study print to a larger statement piece.