Texas Map 1883 State Print - Austin, Houston, San Antonio

This Texas map comes from Cram's Unrivaled Family Atlas of the World, copyrighted 1883 by George Franklin Cram and published in Chicago by A.C. Shewey and Co., a first edition remembered as Cram's first "mass production" world atlas. The sixty-five-map volume was aimed at bringing detailed, affordable state geography into everyday American households at a moment of rapid westward growth.

Texas is mapped here at a scale of about 1:3,100,000, printed in full or outline color with relief shown through hachures and county lines laid out across the state. The map traces the Rio Grande as it forms part of the boundary with Mexico and follows the Gulf of Mexico coastline, alongside the railroads and roads that were expanding rapidly through Texas in the years following the Civil War. By 1883 those same railroads, combined with the spread of barbed wire fencing across the open range, were already closing out the era of the long cattle drives north along the Chisholm Trail that had defined Texas ranching for barely two decades. Both Greenwich and Washington prime meridians appear along the borders.

This print suits anyone with Texas roots, a family that settled the state generations back, a transplant who left Texas and wants a piece of it on the wall, or a collector building a run of Cram's 1883 atlas maps. It also makes a fitting housewarming, birthday, or anniversary gift for a Texan. Every print ships unframed and comes in multiple sizes, so you can pick what suits your space.