Florida in 1899 - Jacksonville, Tampa, Key West, Pensacola

George F. Cram published this map of Florida in 1899 for his Standard American Railway System Atlas of the World, a large-format reference printed on a double sheet and built to document every railroad, town, and post office in the United States with a level of detail Cram's advertising claimed was unmatched by any other publisher of the day. Issued from both New York and Chicago at the very close of the nineteenth century, this Florida sheet shows a state utterly transformed from the antebellum maps in this collection, its railroads and steamship lines now reaching deep into the peninsula that Henry Flagler and Henry Plant had spent the previous decade opening to development.

Jacksonville remained Florida's largest city and its primary rail gateway from the rest of the country. Tampa, reshaped by Plant's railroad extension, had grown into a major Gulf coast port, while Key West held its position as the state's southernmost and historically most populous city, reachable at this date only by steamship. Pensacola continued as the panhandle's key harbor town. The map's marshlands, drainage, and coastline detail reflect Cram's claim to producing the largest-scale, clearest American state maps then in print. Cram's advertising for the atlas claimed its United States maps offered the largest scale and clearest printing of any American publisher then in business. Cram's claim of producing the clearest, largest-scale American maps then available reflects the competitive pride publishers took in their state coverage by the century's end.

This 1899 railway atlas sheet documents Florida just seven years after the 1892 Rand McNally map also in this collection, and set together the two capture the full force of the Flagler and Plant railroad expansions that reshaped the state's coasts in a single decade. This piece suits a collector of turn-of-the-century railroad atlases or anyone with family roots in Jacksonville, Tampa, or Key West. It is offered unframed in a range of sizes.