Texas in 1873 - Austin, Houston, San Antonio

This map of Texas was produced by H.H. Lloyd and published in 1873 by Stedman, Brown & Lyon of Baltimore, appearing within the New Topographical Atlas of the State of Maryland and the District of Columbia alongside maps of the United States and its territories compiled by S.J. Martenet, H.F. Walling, and O.W. Gray. The map was finished as a hand-colored lithograph with each county rendered in full color and relief indicated by hachures, and it includes a separate inset detailing the northern part of the state, a Lloyd configuration distinct from the version of the same base map used the previous decade in Warner, Higgins & Beers' Atlas of Illinois. It captures Texas eight years after the Civil War, a state rebuilding its economy through cattle ranching and rapidly expanding rail lines even as its western frontier remained only loosely settled.

The Llano Estacado, the vast tableland of the Texas Panhandle, is named on the sheet as one of the state's defining and least settled landscapes. Comanche territory is marked across the western plains, a reminder of the Comanche nation's continued presence and resistance on the frontier. Lipan territory is recorded further south, distinguishing the range of a separate Apache people from that of the Comanche. Mail routes and military outposts are also inscribed across the map, tracing the thin network of communication and defense that linked isolated settlements to the rest of the state. Together these features depict a Texas still defined as much by open frontier and Native territory as by its growing towns and railroads.

This map makes a fitting gift for anyone with family ties to the Texas Panhandle or an interest in the state's cattle-era frontier history, or for a collector building a set of Texas maps across the nineteenth century. Texas buyers should note we also carry the state as mapped by Rogers and Johnston in 1857 and by John Bartholomew in 1856: this 1873 Lloyd edition captures a later, post-war Texas of railroads and ranching quite different from the antebellum surveys of the two earlier maps. It is available unframed in a full range of sizes, from a compact study print to a larger statement piece.