Florida in 1838 - Tallahassee, St. Augustine, Pensacola

This Florida map appears in Thomas G. Bradford's 1838 An Illustrated Atlas, published by Weeks, Jordan & Co. and Wiley and Putnam. Florida in 1838 was not yet a state but a U.S. territory, and a violent one — the Second Seminole War had been raging since 1835 as the Seminole people, under leaders like Osceola, resisted forced removal from their Florida homelands, and by the year this map was published the conflict had already dragged on far longer and cost far more than the federal government had expected, with fighting still years from resolution. George W. Boynton engraved the sheet at roughly 1:2,217,600.

Counties are shown in distinct hand-applied colors across a peninsula still mostly wilderness at the time, its interior far less settled than the map's tidy county lines might suggest, bordered by the Gulf of Mexico and the Atlantic Ocean.

Florida families with roots predating statehood tend to want this one, as does a transplant with Sunshine State ties. It also suits a collector of territorial-era American maps. The print is offered unframed and in multiple sizes.