Wisconsin Map 1878 Railroad Print - Madison, Milwaukee, Green Bay

George Franklin Cram, working from his Western Map Depot in Chicago, published this Rail Road and Township Map of Wisconsin in 1878 as part of his Standard American Atlas of the United States, a large, tall-format sheet hand-colored with township boundaries in red across the state, drawn from the atlas's rare original plates rather than the smaller reprints issued in the following decade. This printing comes from the atlas's rare original run, mapping a state whose economy, built on timber and dairy farming, was still taking shape more than a decade after the Civil War's end, three decades after Wisconsin itself had first entered the Union. Wisconsin appears here with its southern and eastern counties densely surveyed into townships while settlement thinned noticeably toward the more heavily forested north.

Madison anchors the map as the state capital, positioned between four lakes near the state's southern border. Milwaukee appears on Lake Michigan as Wisconsin's principal port and commercial center, its harbor linking the state's farm and timber trade to the wider Great Lakes shipping network. Green Bay sits to the north as a smaller but strategically placed harbor town, the gateway through which the state's northern timber trade increasingly moved. The Mississippi River forms the state's western border and the Wisconsin River threads through its interior, and together the capital, the two ports, and the two rivers trace a state whose settlement was steadily pushing northward from its established southern counties.

This sheet fits naturally alongside other editions in a growing set, whether for a Wisconsin family with roots in the state's homesteading-era farm counties or for a collector building that set out across the decades. The store also carries Wisconsin from Cram's own later 1893 and 1874 editions, combined with Iowa in Bradford's 1838 atlas, and combined with Michigan in Cram's 1883 and Mitchell's 1882 sheets, each pairing Wisconsin with a neighboring state rather than mapping it alone; this 1878 sheet is the only edition in the collection to map Wisconsin entirely on its own. It's printed unframed and available in a range of sizes to fit whatever wall it's headed for.