Map of the United States of America Showing the Rail Roads

The railroads of America in the mid-1850s.

Published in New York by Harper & Brothers in 1856, this fascinating folding map was designed by the noted American cartographer J. Calvin Smith to illustrate Harper’s Statistical Gazetteer. Issued at a moment of unprecedented national expansion, the map captures the United States on the threshold of modern industrialization, capturing the feverish expansion of the American railroad system just five years before the outbreak of the Civil War.

The main map encompasses the entire United States from the Atlantic Seaboard to the Pacific Coast, extending north into Upper and Lower Canada and south through Northern Mexico. The densely populated eastern half of the nation is webbed with a thick network of completed and proposed rail lines, vividly illustrating how iron tracks were rapidly replacing canals and turnpikes as the primary arteries of commerce and settlement. Farther west, the map provides a fascinating view of the Trans-Mississippi West, highlighting early territorial boundaries, military posts, and proposed Pacific railroad survey corridors across Kansas, Nebraska, and the vast interior.