Washington Map 1874 Territorial Print - Puget Sound, Olympia, Spokane

Asher & Adams, working out of New York, issued this Washington sheet in 1874 as part of their New Commercial, Topographical, and Statistical Atlas and Gazetteer of the United States, one of the first American atlases built almost entirely around the country's expanding rail network rather than its terrain. This printing, produced late in 1874 and described by the firm as its most complete edition, is hand-colored and engraved by the Franklin Type Foundry, with relief shown through hachures and spot heights that give the territory's mountain country more visual definition than the atlas's flatter eastern sheets. The sheet maps Washington as a territory rather than a state, fifteen years before its 1889 admission to the Union, drawn a full fifteen years ahead of the Northern Pacific Railroad's completion into Puget Sound that would finally connect the territory to the transcontinental network.

Beyond county coloring and rail distances, little is named on the sheet itself, but the territory's geography was already set. The Puget Sound region held the bulk of Washington's early settlement, with towns growing up around its protected harbors long before rail reached the territory. East of the Cascade Range, the land shifted to dry, sparsely settled wheat and range country, a division the map's own light rail coverage in the territory's interior quietly reflects. Counties and rivers went largely unlabeled on this particular sheet, a sign of how much of the territory remained outside the surveyed, railroad-linked world the rest of the atlas was built to chart.

For a Washington family with Puget Sound roots, someone who made the move west more recently, or a collector building out the earliest American railroad atlases state by state, this sheet has a specific pull. The store also carries Washington from Cram's later 1893 and 1883 editions; this 1874 Asher & Adams sheet is the earliest of the three, mapping a territory still fifteen years from statehood and years ahead of the rail connections that would later tie it fully into the national network. It's printed unframed and available in a range of sizes to fit whatever wall it's headed for.