California Map 1857 State Print - Sacramento, San Francisco, Sierra Nevada

Henry Darwin Rogers and Alexander Keith Johnston issued this State of California sheet in 1857, published in London by Edward Stanford and engraved by W. & A.K. Johnston of Edinburgh, part of their Atlas of the United States. This printing outlines California in pink with its counties delineated in blue, drawn just seven years after California's 1850 admission to the Union in the aftermath of the Gold Rush. The sheet maps California statewide, showing mountain ranges, rivers, and county divisions across a state still being shaped by its mining-era settlement.

California's counties are marked in blue across the sheet, an administrative structure still relatively young given the state had only recently been organized following the Gold Rush's rapid influx of settlers. The Sierra Nevada range is prominently shown, the mountainous spine that had drawn the mining activity responsible for California's rapid growth, while the Sacramento and San Joaquin Rivers are clearly marked as the state's central agricultural artery. Settlement in 1857 remained concentrated around the mining districts and the young city of San Francisco. Together the counties, the Sierra Nevada, and the two rivers sketch a state whose identity was still overwhelmingly shaped by the mining rush that had founded it less than a decade earlier.

For a California family with Gold Rush-era roots, or a collector drawn to this British-published perspective on the pre-boom state, this sheet has a specific pull. The store also carries California with a San Francisco and bay inset from Mitchell's later 1884 sheet elsewhere in this collection; this 1857 Rogers and Johnston sheet is the earliest California edition in the store, drawn while the state's identity was still overwhelmingly defined by its recent Gold Rush settlement. It's printed unframed and available in a range of sizes to fit whatever wall it's headed for.