California & Utah Map 1860 County Print - Los Angeles, San Francisco, Salt Lake City

Samuel Augustus Mitchell Jr. issued this first state of his County Map of California in 1860, the same year he inherited his father's Philadelphia publishing house and released the New General Atlas that would carry the family firm for another three decades. Mitchell Sr. had built the business into a leading producer of school atlases and wall maps over more than thirty years, and was among the earliest American publishers to engrave on steel; his son continued that technical standard after taking over. This California sheet is distinguished by its unusually large inset of the Great Salt Lake country, a pairing that reflects how closely California and Utah Territory were still linked in the eastern publisher's cartographic imagination on the eve of the Civil War. Decorative bordering surrounds the whole composition in the ornamental style typical of Mitchell's atlas work of this period.

The map records California's early county configurations, still lacking Riverside, Orange, Imperial and Ventura Counties, which would only be organized in later decades as the southern part of the state filled in. Early wagon routes and railroad lines are traced across the state, alongside an immense rendering of Owens Lake and Tulare Lake, both since largely drained or diminished by twentieth-century irrigation projects. The San Francisco Bay inset offers a close-up view of the northern port city's shoreline, a natural pairing on a sheet otherwise dominated by the state's interior geography. Taken together, the Salt Lake inset and the California county detail make this a genuinely Civil War-vintage regional map, capturing both territories at the exact configuration in place just before Nevada's territorial creation the following year.

This sheet suits a collector interested in California's connection to the Mormon migration routes through Utah Territory, or a family with roots spanning both regions in the years just before the Civil War. We also carry Britton & Rey's 1860 wall map of California from the same year; where that sheet emphasizes mining infrastructure and trail networks within California alone, this Mitchell county map's distinguishing feature is its large companion view of the Great Salt Lake country, a pairing unique among our California maps of the period. It's available unframed across our full size range, from a compact print to a large-format piece.