Wisconsin in 1925 - Milwaukee, Madison, Green Bay

The George F. Cram Company produced this map of Milwaukee for its 1925 Unrivaled Atlas of the World, the Chicago firm's flagship postwar publication, revised to carry the new international boundaries drawn after the First World War alongside updated federal census population figures for every American city it mapped. The Milwaukee sheet was engraved with the atlas's characteristic clean, high-contrast color scheme, distinguishing streets, railways, parks, and drainage in far sharper detail than the hand-tinted city plans of the previous century that the firm's own earlier atlases had relied on. The map covers the city of Milwaukee, Wisconsin, in the mid-1920s, by which point it had grown into one of the Great Lakes' major manufacturing centers, its brewing and heavy-machinery industries built on the same lakefront access that had first drawn settlers there a century earlier.

The Milwaukee River is traced winding through the heart of the city, the waterway around which the original settlement grew before the city expanded east to the Lake Michigan shoreline shown along the map's edge. Several parks are marked in green across the sheet, evidence of the city-beautification efforts Milwaukee had pursued through the early twentieth century as its population swelled with German and Central European immigrant families. Railway lines radiate from the city center in multiple directions, tracing the freight network that carried the city's beer, machinery, and manufactured goods out to the rest of the Midwest. Together the river, the lake, and the rail lines show a Milwaukee built at the exact point where water power, lake shipping, and rail transport all converged.

This 1925 Cram edition is a natural pick for a Milwaukee or Wisconsin family with roots in the city's brewing or manufacturing trades, and pairs well with the store's earlier 1874 Mitchell plan of Milwaukee; where that older map shows the city carved into its first wards just after the Civil War, this later Cram edition captures Milwaukee half a century on, already a mature industrial metropolis. It is available unframed in a full range of sizes, from a compact study print to a larger statement piece.