Wisconsin in 1874 - Milwaukee, Racine, Madison

S. Augustus Mitchell Jr. issued this plan of Milwaukee in 1874 as part of his New General Atlas, a Philadelphia-published volume notable for introducing the atlas's first large-format Kansas and Nebraska maps that same edition alongside new city plans of Milwaukee and Detroit. The Milwaukee sheet was hand-colored and set within an ornamental engraved border, a decorative treatment Mitchell reserved for the atlas's featured city plans rather than its plainer state maps, engraved by W.H. Gamble and W. Williams. The map covers Milwaukee, Wisconsin, less than a decade after the Civil War, when the city was still governed as a compact set of numbered wards even as its lakefront position was pulling in a rapidly growing wave of German immigrant settlement.

The map identifies Milwaukee's wards individually, numbered first through several higher divisions, each colored separately to make the young city's municipal boundaries immediately legible. Major public buildings are marked across the grid, the civic and government structures that anchored a city still assembling its permanent institutions. Railroads and roads are laid out converging toward the lakefront, alongside the canals that helped move goods between the harbor and the inland warehouse districts before Milwaukee's rail network fully matured. Lake Michigan itself is shown running along the city's eastern edge, the access point that had drawn settlers to the site in the first place and would soon make Milwaukee one of the busiest ports on the Great Lakes.

This earlier Mitchell plan is well suited to a Milwaukee family researching which ward an ancestor's household or parish stood in during the 1870s, and it pairs naturally with the store's later 1925 Cram map of the same city; where that Cram edition shows a mature industrial Milwaukee, this 1874 Mitchell sheet catches the city in its formative postwar years, still organized around a handful of numbered wards. It is available unframed in a full range of sizes, from a compact study print to a larger statement piece.