Washington in 1879 - Olympia, Seattle, Walla Walla

This map of Washington Territory was published in 1879 by Rand McNally & Co. of Chicago as part of the fourth edition of the firm's Business Atlas, the company's first general atlas of the United States, originally issued in 1876-77 and covering only the Pacific slope states before expanding into this fuller edition. The territory is rendered with counties in printed outline color and relief shown by hachures and spot heights, a step up in production speed from the hand-colored maps competing firms were still producing by hand in the same years. Named railroads are traced across the sheet, a detail the Business Atlas made a selling point for the shippers, land agents, and businessmen who made up much of its readership, at a time when Washington remained a territory still eleven years from statehood.

Olympia, the territorial capital, sat at the southern tip of Puget Sound, already the seat of government even as Seattle grew into the territory's busiest port and timber-shipping center. Walla Walla, further east, anchored the agricultural country of the Columbia Plateau and had been one of the territory's most important interior towns since the fur-trade and mission era decades earlier. The Cascade Range divides these two worlds, the wet timbered coast and the drier wheat country beyond the mountains, a divide that shaped settlement patterns across the territory for generations. Rivers, mountains, and county lines fill out the rest of the sheet, giving a working reference of a territory still being organized on paper as much as on the ground.

This map suits a gift for anyone with family history in the Walla Walla valley or around Puget Sound, or for a collector interested in Rand McNally's earliest general business atlases. Washington buyers should note we also carry the territory as issued in Rand McNally's own 1878 pocket map and in George F. Cram's 1875 railroad atlas: this 1879 Business Atlas sheet is distinguished by its printed rather than hand-applied color and its place within Rand McNally's first true national atlas series. It is available unframed in a full range of sizes, from a compact study print to a larger statement piece.