Texas in 1872 - Austin, Dallas, El Paso

H. H. Lloyd of Chicago published this map of Texas in 1872, a scarce sheet from a publisher whose surviving cartographic output is limited to only a handful of known titles. The map records county divisions across eastern and central Texas in unusual detail, noting the creation dates of newly established jurisdictions alongside older, pre-statehood counties, a level of administrative record-keeping uncommon on commercial atlas maps of the period. It depicts Texas seven years into Reconstruction, a state still absorbing the political and economic disruption of the Civil War even as its eastern counties multiplied rapidly while its western reaches, organized into a handful of sprawling jurisdictions such as Presidio and El Paso Counties, remained functionally frontier.

Austin, the state capital on the Colorado River, anchors the map's central corridor amid the dense cluster of newly subdivided counties recorded across eastern Texas. Dallas, still a modest county seat in 1872 but already gaining significance as rail lines pushed west across the Blackland Prairie, appears well within the settled eastern portion of the state. El Paso, far to the west on the Rio Grande, gives its name to one of the last remaining oversized frontier counties, alongside neighboring Presidio County, that had not yet been broken into smaller jurisdictions. The Texas Panhandle and High Plains still carry the historical designation Young Territory, unorganized ground crossed by U.S. military forts, mail roads, tribal territories, and the surveyed but unbuilt route of the proposed Southern Pacific Railroad along the 32nd parallel.

This map suits a Texas family, an Austin or El Paso transplant, or a collector tracing the state's Reconstruction-era county expansion. The store also carries Samuel Augustus Mitchell's 1852 Texas map, issued two decades earlier before most of the state's eastern counties existed at all; this later Lloyd edition instead documents exactly how much subdivision and rail development had reshaped Texas by the early 1870s. It is available unframed in a range of sizes.