Texas Map 1865 State Print - Galveston, Austin, Houston

This map of Texas was produced by S. Augustus Mitchell Jr. and published in 1865 by E.H. Butler & Co. for Mitchell's New Reference Atlas for the Use of Colleges, Libraries, Families and Counting Houses. Mitchell had started out as a schoolteacher, frustrated with the shoddy geography texts of his own classroom days, and that frustration is what first pushed him into map publishing back in the early 1830s. This sheet is hand-colored and engraved with relief shown by hachures, and it is unusual within the atlas for carrying two insets, one of Northern Texas and a second of the vicinity of Galveston City, reflecting the port's importance on the Gulf coast. It covers the state at the close of the Civil War in 1865, a moment when Texas, the last Confederate state to see major fighting end, faced the long process of reconstruction and reintegration into the Union.

Galveston appears in its own dedicated inset, its status as the state's principal Gulf port and largest city underscored by the extra detail the mapmaker gave it. Austin, the state capital, sits inland on the map's central counties, while the Northern Texas inset gives a closer view of the frontier counties still marked by Indian settlements and the mail routes that connected them to the rest of the state. Rivers including the Rio Grande, Brazos, and Colorado are traced across the sheet, defining the corridors along which Texas settlement had spread by the mid-1860s. Together the insets and county detail capture a state still being mapped as much as it was being settled.

This map is dated 1865, the very year the Civil War ended, and for Texas, the last Confederate state to see major fighting stop, that date carries real weight. It's a natural pick for a Texas native or transplant who wants that exact moment on the wall, or a collector drawn to the extra cartographic detail Mitchell gave Galveston and the northern frontier. It also makes a fitting choice for anyone with roots in Gulf Coast trade or ranching families whose land shows up among these mid-1860s counties. It is available unframed in a full range of sizes, from a compact study print to a larger statement piece for an office, den, or study.