U.S. Census Office, Distribution of the Population: 1900 (1903)

This map from the Statistical Atlas, 1900, shows the density of the population across the United States in 1900 and the center of population in Bartholomew County, Indiana. The darker the brown on the map, the denser the population. As Henry Gannett wrote in the Statistical Atlas, "The Twelfth Census (Plate 13) marked one hundred and ten years' growth of the United States, during which period the population has increased more than twenty-one times..." (p. 36). Gannett also noted that, although unsettled land increased in the United States between 1890 and 1900, the density of population generally increased because of population increases in settled areas. The U.S. population had expanded into previously unsettled areas in Midwestern and Western states, thanks to the completion of transcontinental railroads, federal land policies like the Homestead Act, mineral discoveries, and mining and lumbering enterprises (see p. 36). As this map demonstrates, people tended to cluster around coastal ports, along railway corridors, near major mining booms, and in fertile river valleys.