Florida in 1911 - Orlando, DeLand, Key West

Rand McNally & Company published this map of Florida in Chicago in 1911, by which date the firm had become one of the largest and most trusted names in American cartography, having spent the previous half century evolving from a small railway-ticket printer into a leader in road maps, atlases, and educational geography. The map is colored by county and reflects a Florida entering its land-boom era, still years before the speculative real estate frenzy of the 1920s but already benefiting from the steady development that railroads and drainage projects had brought to the peninsula's interior and southern reaches.

A large inset details Orange and Volusia counties, then centered on the citrus-growing region around Orlando and DeLand, while a second substantial inset covers southern Florida and the Keys, tracing the string of islands stretching from the mainland toward Key West. Orlando, still a modest citrus and cattle town decades before its transformation into a tourism capital, anchors the state's central interior, DeLand serves the developing citrus belt of Volusia County, and Key West, connected to the mainland only by boat until Henry Flagler's Overseas Railroad reached it two years later, remains Florida's southernmost and among its most economically important towns. The map's dual insets reflect Rand McNally's recognition that Florida's most commercially significant growth in this period was occurring in these two very different regions simultaneously.

This map is a fine gift for a family with Florida roots, for a transplant now settled in Orlando or the Keys, or for a collector of early twentieth-century Rand McNally state maps. It is offered unframed in a range of sizes.