Texas in 1893 - Austin, Houston, Dallas

Wood Brothers Cash Store of Unadilla, New York gave this map away to shoppers in 1893, bound into The Columbian World's Fair Atlas that Chicago publisher George F. Cram produced to coincide with that year's World's Fair and the 400th anniversary of Columbus's arrival in the Americas. A retailer's marketing gimmick from a small New York town, it survives today as a genuine artifact of Gilded Age American atlas-making.

Texas was too large for a single sheet, so this map spreads the state across two facing pages at a scale of roughly 1:3,000,000, with a separate inset carrying the continuation of the state's northern reaches. State and county boundaries are picked out in hand-applied outline color, relief is rendered in hachure shading, and the Gulf of Mexico is prominently drawn along the coast. Austin anchors the map as the state capital, while Houston and Galveston both appear along the Gulf, the latter still the state's dominant port in 1893, years before the 1900 hurricane that would shift that role to Houston for good. Both Greenwich and Washington appear as prime meridians along the map's edges.

A map like this suits Texas transplants who want a piece of home, a family tracing roots back to a specific county seat, or a collector building out a full run of Cram's 1893 state maps. It arrives unframed and is offered in multiple print sizes, making it a natural choice for a housewarming, birthday, or anniversary gift.