Arizona and New Mexico in 1927 - Phoenix, Tucson, Santa Fe, Albuquerque

The National Map Company of Indianapolis published this joint map of Arizona and New Mexico in 1927 as part of its Official Paved Road and Commercial Survey of the United States, a series built specifically to track the young automobile age's paved, improved, and unimproved roads across the country. This was a different kind of atlas entirely from the railroad-era state maps of the prior century, aimed at motorists rather than merchants, and it renders both states in outline color with administrative boundaries, roads, and rivers laid out for practical travel planning. By 1927 the automobile had reshaped how Americans crossed the Southwest, and this map captures that transition in real time.

Phoenix and Santa Fe, the respective state capitals since Arizona and New Mexico both achieved statehood in 1912, anchor the map as the region's political centers. Tucson, long the commercial heart of southern Arizona, and Albuquerque, New Mexico's largest city and a key stop along the emerging highway corridors, round out the map's principal destinations. The Rio Grande threads down through New Mexico while the Colorado and Gila rivers define Arizona's southwestern reach, geographic anchors that had guided travelers through this country for centuries before pavement arrived. The map's road network reflects a region only beginning to be tied together by automobile.

This 1927 road map sits at a very different moment than the 1868 Mitchell atlas map of Arizona and New Mexico also in this collection, which shows the two territories under Native American and Spanish-era place names decades before either reached statehood; together the two prints border the sixty years that carried this country from frontier territory to modern states. This piece suits anyone with roots in Phoenix, Tucson, Santa Fe, or Albuquerque, or a collector drawn to early American motoring history. It is offered unframed in a range of sizes.