California in 1893 - Los Angeles, San Francisco, San Diego

This map traveled home with a Wood Brothers Cash Store customer in Unadilla, New York back in 1893, part of a promotional atlas the store commissioned from Chicago cartographer George F. Cram to mark the Columbian Exposition and the 400th anniversary of Columbus's arrival in the Americas.

California's map runs at a scale of 1:2,500,000, with state and county boundaries picked out in hand-applied outline color and mountain relief rendered in hachure shading. Los Angeles, San Francisco, and San Diego are all marked on the sheet, offering a snapshot of the state's late-19th-century urban landscape, with San Francisco still the state's financial and shipping center a full two decades before Los Angeles would begin to eclipse it. The Sierra Nevada and Central Valley are both traced across the map's interior, ground still being reshaped in the aftermath of the gold rush and now increasingly given over to irrigated farmland. Both Greenwich and Washington appear as prime meridians along the map's edges.

A print like this suits a California transplant who wants a piece of home, a family with roots in one of these three cities, or a collector chasing a full run of Cram's 1893 state maps. TheMapVault also carries an 1883 Cram California map from an earlier atlas; that sheet predates this one by a decade and comes from a different publisher and volume entirely, so the two make a striking before-and-after pair for a collector. Every print ships unframed and is available in multiple sizes.