Florida in 1874 - Tallahassee, Jacksonville, Key West

This Florida map is part of Asher & Adams' New Commercial, Topographical, and Statistical Atlas and Gazetteer of the United States, published in New York in 1874. Florida had been a state for less than thirty years by this point, and its interior and southern reaches remained sparsely settled frontier even as land speculators and prospective settlers were beginning to eye the peninsula's climate and undeveloped acreage — the earliest stirrings of a land boom that would take off in earnest only decades later. An inset covering the southern portion of Florida accompanies the main map, engraved and electrotyped at the Franklin Type Foundry, with townships and rail distances marked across the peninsula's less-developed southern reaches.

The sheet captures Florida in a transitional period, its northern rail lines well established while the southern portion remained largely undeveloped territory, part of the most complete late-1874 edition of the atlas.

Florida transplants and lifelong residents alike tend to want this one, a Sunshine State transplant, or a collector of Gilded Age railroad atlases. Our 1838 Bradford sheet for Florida shows the same peninsula while it was still a territory embroiled in the Second Seminole War, decades before either statehood or this rail network existed. The print is unframed and available in multiple sizes.