America’s Largest Cities Over 250 Years, Mapped

The United States is 250 years old. But you’ll struggle to find data going back that far — regrettably, not one of the Declaration of Independence’s 27 grievances regarded the lack of quality census data.

So we took matters into our own hands, digging through modern census data, beautifully archived older census data and decades-old books to assemble a complete set of America’s 100 largest cities from the Revolution to today.

It was a journey!

When the then-cutting-edge Constitution prompted America’s first census in 1790, the Massachusetts metropolis of Marblehead ranked as the 10th largest town in America. Riding high on fishing and shipping, it boasted 5,661 residents and a proud recent history of privateering on the high seas.

But these days, the town that probably gave us the U.S. Navy doesn’t even rate as the 10th largest city in Essex County, Massachusetts.

It’s not the only town in that original top 10 to fall from grace. The Philadelphia suburbs of Northern Liberties and Southwark don’t even exist as independent entities any more. (This is a good time to note that, hamstrung by historical data, we’ll focus on cities instead of metro areas, so suburbs will be counted separately. This leads to a different list of top cities than you may be used to.)

From those original rankings, only New York City and Philadelphia remain in the top spots. In the most recent top 10, cities in what was once Mexico now outnumber cities from the original 13 colonies by more than three to one, thanks to the rise of California, Texas and Arizona.

But if this is America’s 250th, shouldn’t we be going back to the populations of 1776? That’s tricky, given the aforementioned lack of a Colonial Census Bureau. But we did find estimates in 1932’s blockbuster “American Population Before The Federal Census of 1790,” later refined by urban-history heavyweight Carl Bridenbaugh.

Bridenbaugh focused on five of the most important early American cities: Boston, New York, Philadelphia, Charleston, South Carolina, and Newport, Rhode Island.

For much of the colonial period, Boston reigned, only to be passed by fast-growing Philly in the years leading up to the Revolution, when wartime chaos, occupations and fleeing loyalists scrambled the population of most major cities.

After the war, New York clawed its way to the top spot. It still hasn’t let go.

We know this because once we put all our sources together, we could suddenly chart the entire sweep of U.S. population history.

In the early years, new major cities generally appeared within the friendly confines of the 13 original colonies. But soon New Englanders, in particular, hit the limits of their rocky soil and sought friendlier soils in the Ohio River Valley. From there, colonists invaded Native American lands throughout the Midwest and Appalachia — a pattern which would repeat for at least another century.

In the years around the Civil War, new cities popped up across the Louisiana Purchase as the railroad opened the country’s interior to newcomers from the East Coast and Europe.

The industrial revolution redrew our America’s city power rankings again, pulling immigrants (and then Black Southerners) to the factory towns of the Northeast and Midwest while slashing travel times into the wide-open American West with steam locomotives and, later, cars and trucks.

Why did Americans swarm the Sun Belt after the World Wars? The mass production of air conditioners in the 1950s helped. But we also saw increased Cold War defense spending, massive dams in the arid West, and the rise of manufacturing in Southern states where unions were scarce and workers cheaper. The rise of destination retirement communities also drew older Americans southward.

In the following years, the top 100 cities calcified into the country as we know it today.

Hi there! Here at the new NOTUS data column, we’re still figuring out what to cover. What are you curious about? International trade in diamonds? North American populations before colonization? Most common fonts, by government agency? Just ask!