New Mexico Map 1874 Territorial Print - Santa Fe, Taos, Albuquerque

Asher & Adams, working out of New York, issued this New Mexico sheet in 1874 as part of their New Commercial, Topographical, and Statistical Atlas and Gazetteer of the United States, one of the first American atlases built almost entirely around the country's expanding rail network rather than its terrain. This printing, produced late in 1874 and described by the firm as its most complete edition, is hand-colored and engraved by the Franklin Type Foundry, and carries an inset detailing the territory's southern reaches, a level of added coverage the atlas doesn't extend to every western sheet. The sheet maps New Mexico as a territory rather than a state, thirty-eight years before its 1912 admission to the Union, a status that placed it squarely outside the national rail and settlement framework the rest of the atlas was built to track.

Santa Fe, Taos, and Albuquerque all appear by name on the sheet, along with the surrounding counties of Valencia and Bernalillo, giving this map more named detail than most of the atlas's other western sheets. Santa Fe, the territorial capital, traced its founding back to 1610, making it one of the oldest continuously governed seats in the country, while Albuquerque, still a modest settlement in 1874, would not become a rail town until the Atchison, Topeka and Santa Fe Railway arrived several years later. Taos, further north, already carried its long-standing identity as a trading post at the crossing of Hispanic, Puebloan, and Anglo settlement. Together the three towns and two counties sketch a territory whose institutions predated the United States itself.

For a New Mexico family with Santa Fe or Albuquerque roots, or a collector building out the earliest American railroad atlases state by state, this sheet has a specific pull. The store also carries New Mexico from Cram's later 1893 and 1883 editions; this 1874 Asher & Adams sheet is the earliest of the three, mapping the territory years before the rail lines that would define its later 19th-century growth had even arrived. It's printed unframed and available in a range of sizes to fit whatever wall it's headed for.