Florida in 1832 - St. Augustine, Pensacola, Tallahassee

Hinton, Simpkin & Marshall of London published this map of Florida Territory in 1832, quite possibly the earliest printed map of Florida ever issued in Great Britain, predating the Society for the Diffusion of Useful Knowledge's own Florida map by a full year. The map's title curiously refers to the "State of Florida" despite the territory remaining thirteen years away from statehood, a small but telling error that reflects how loosely British publishers of the period sometimes handled American political geography from across the Atlantic. It arrives just three years before the outbreak of the Second Seminole War, a conflict that would dominate Florida's territorial history for the following decade.

The map's southern reaches are dominated by Monroe County, Mosquito County, and a massive area simply labeled Seminole Indians and Indian Reserve, reflecting how much of the peninsula remained outside direct American administrative control. Alachua, St. Johns, Nassau, Duval, Madison, Jefferson, Leon, Gadsden, Walton, Jackson, Escambia, and Washington round out the territory's fifteen counties, concentrated almost entirely across the northern panhandle and upper peninsula. St. Augustine, the old Spanish colonial capital in the northeast, Pensacola, the historic port on the western panhandle, and Tallahassee, chosen as territorial capital in 1824 for its central position between the two, anchor a still-primitive lake, river, and swamp system that the map renders with notably good detail in the Florida Keys.

This map is a fitting gift for a family with Florida roots, for a transplant now settled in St. Augustine or Tallahassee, or for a collector of scarce British-published maps of early Florida Territory. It is offered unframed in a range of sizes.