Florida in 1859 - Tampa, Key West, St. Augustine

Joseph Hutchins Colton published this map of Florida in New York in 1859, two years before the outbreak of the Civil War, part of the extensive catalog that made his firm one of the leading American map publishers of the mid-nineteenth century. Colton had built his business from modest beginnings, working a general store and later as a night clerk at the Hartford post office before establishing his New York publishing house in the early 1830s, and by the 1850s his firm was known for high-quality steel-plate engravings paired with decorative borders and careful hand watercoloring. This sheet, featuring a large inset plan of the Florida Keys, captures the state during its final years of antebellum development.

Florida's southern counties, Dade, Monroe, Brevard, Manatee, and Hillsboro, dominate the map's lower half, though state surveys had still not been completed across Monroe and Dade, which remain shown largely as swampland, an early record of the Everglades that would resist thorough mapping for decades to come. Numerous forts dot the peninsula, a legacy of the recently concluded Seminole Wars, alongside early roads, rivers, lakes, islands, and Indian areas including a district labeled Bowlegs Land after the Seminole leader. Tampa anchors the growing Gulf Coast settlement around Hillsboro County, Key West stands as Florida's largest and most prosperous city at the time on the strength of its wrecking and cigar industries, and St. Augustine remains the state's oldest continuously settled town on the Atlantic coast.

This map is a fine gift for a family with Florida roots, for a transplant now settled in Tampa or the Keys, or for a collector of pre-Civil War Colton maps. It is offered unframed in a range of sizes.