Florida Map 1845 State Print - Tallahassee, St. Augustine, Key West

Sidney Morse and Samuel Breese, working in New York, published this map of Florida in 1845 as part of Morse's North American Atlas, issued by Harper & Brothers across nine illustrated parts sold for twenty-five cents apiece. Morse and Breese pioneered the cerographic wax-engraving process used to print the map, a technique cheaper than copper-plate engraving, and this particular sheet carries an inset of West Florida so the state's separated panhandle territory could be rendered in the same detail as the peninsula proper. Florida is shown here in the very year it was admitted to the Union as a state, on March 3, 1845, making this one of the first commercially printed maps to depict Florida in its new statehood, only three years after the exhausting Second Seminole War had finally wound down across the peninsula's interior.

Tallahassee anchors the map as the capital of the brand-new state, a position it had held since territorial days owing to its central location between the Atlantic and Gulf coasts. St. Augustine represents the old Spanish settlement on the Atlantic coast, already by far the oldest continuously occupied European town in what was now the United States. Key West anchors the southern tip of the state, a small but strategically important port controlling the shipping lanes through the Florida Straits. The St. Johns River runs up the peninsula's eastern side, the state's principal navigable waterway and the route by which most interior settlement had so far proceeded.

This sheet documents a genuine founding moment rather than a generic decade, which makes it especially fitting for a Florida family with roots in the peninsula's oldest towns or a collector marking the exact year the state joined the Union. The store's other Florida editions include the 1883 sheet grouping Florida with Alabama, Georgia, and South Carolina, an 1857 edition pairing Florida with the Carolinas and Georgia, and an 1878 Cram map with a dedicated Florida Keys inset; this 1845 Morse sheet is the only one in the collection printed in Florida's actual first year of statehood. It's printed unframed and available in a range of sizes to fit whatever wall it's headed for.