California in 1856 - San Francisco, Los Angeles, San Diego

Charles W. Morse of New York published this map of California, with a large inset of Utah and part of New Mexico, in his General Atlas of the World, issued through the New York firm of D. Appleton & Company in 1856. The Morse family had pioneered the cerographic, or wax-engraving, printing process in their American Atlas and Cerographic Bible atlases of the 1840s, and this sheet, alongside Colton's contemporary California map, ranks among the earliest separately issued maps of the state to appear in an American commercial atlas. The map still shows California with only thirty-three counties and does not yet reflect the creation of San Bernardino County, and its treatment of the young state's southern reaches, where only San Diego, Los Angeles, Tulare, Santa Barbara, and San Luis Obispo Counties appear, is notably sparse compared with the more developed detail running north from Tulare County.

San Francisco anchors Northern California as the state's dominant port and financial center, presiding over the more thoroughly surveyed country running north from Tulare County that Morse's engravers rendered with considerable confidence. Los Angeles and San Diego, by contrast, sit within a southern California the map treats far more sparsely, alongside only Tulare, Santa Barbara, and San Luis Obispo Counties, a reflection of how thinly settled the region still was in 1856. Lake Tahoe appears simply as Mountain Lake, not yet carrying the name it would later adopt, while massive Tulare Lake still dominates the southern Central Valley on the map, decades before irrigation would drain it. East of the Sierra Nevada, the sheet marks Fort Miller, Fort Bishop, Fort Washington, and an unnamed Indian fort, isolated outposts guarding the thin line of settlement against the desert interior.

This map is a fitting gift for a California family with roots anywhere from San Francisco to San Diego, or for a collector seeking one of the earliest commercial atlas maps of the state, alongside its close contemporary from Colton. Its unusually sparse depiction of Southern California and the still-unnamed Lake Tahoe make it a distinctive snapshot of California just before the state's thirty-fourth county was created, quite different from the more subdivided California sheets the store carries from later decades. It is available unframed in a range of sizes.