Washington in 1889 - Seattle, Tacoma, Spokane

This map of Washington was published in 1889 by Rand McNally & Co. of Chicago for the eighteenth edition of the firm's Enlarged Business Atlas and Shippers' Guide, by then a far more polished production than the company's 1870s atlases, printed in full color rather than the hand-tinted or outline work of earlier editions. Counties are outlined distinctly, railroads highlighted across the state, and relief shown by hachures throughout the sheet, reflecting the increasing precision of commercial cartography by the late 1880s. Most significantly, 1889 was the year Washington was admitted to the Union as the 42nd state, and this map captures the territory at the exact moment of that transition, its rail network by then mature enough to have supported the population growth that made statehood possible.

Vancouver Island appears at the northwestern edge of the sheet, a reminder of how closely Washington's coastal waters were bound up with British Columbia in the geography of the period. In the northeastern part of the state, the map marks the Colville and Stevens Indian Reservations, land set aside under federal policy even as railroads and settlers pressed into the same region. Railroads are picked out prominently across the state, tracing the routes that had done so much to make statehood economically viable. Together these features capture Washington in transition, a state on paper for the first time yet still marked by the reservation boundaries and colonial-era place names of its territorial past.

This map makes a meaningful gift for anyone with family history from Washington's statehood year, or for a collector who wants the precise 1889 moment when the territory became the 42nd state. Washington buyers should note we also carry the territory as mapped two decades earlier by Cram and Asher & Adams, well before railroads and statehood transformed the region: this 1889 Rand McNally edition is the only one in our collection to show Washington in the very year it joined the Union. It is available unframed in a full range of sizes, from a compact study print to a larger statement piece.