Florida Map 1878 Railroad Print - Tallahassee, Jacksonville, Key West

George Franklin Cram, working from his Western Map Depot in Chicago, published this Rail Road and County Map of Florida in 1878 as part of his Standard American Atlas of the United States, a hand-colored sheet with county boundaries marked in red and a dedicated inset of the Florida Keys alongside the main statewide map. This printing comes from the atlas's rare original run, mapping a state that remained the least populated in the entire former Confederacy at this date, a full generation after Florida had first entered the Union. Florida appears here with its settlement still confined almost entirely to the northern panhandle and eastern coastal fringe, its vast peninsula interior still largely unmapped and unsettled frontier at this date.

Tallahassee anchors the map as the state capital, positioned in the settled northern panhandle rather than anywhere near the peninsula it governed. Jacksonville appears on the eastern coast as the state's principal port, its position on the St. Johns River making it the gateway for what little trade moved along Florida's Atlantic side. Key West, reached only through the sheet's dedicated Keys inset, anchors the state's far south as an island community whose maritime economy had little connection to the agricultural interior further north. The St. Johns River, one of the few navigable waterways in a state otherwise dominated by swamp and scrubland, threads north along the coast, and together the capital, the port, and the island town trace a state whose settlement clung almost entirely to its edges.

This sheet documents Florida well before the peninsula's later development, a detail that will matter to a family with roots in the state's 19th-century panhandle or coastal towns and to a collector drawn to the state's frontier-era cartography. The store also carries Florida combined with Alabama, Georgia, and South Carolina in Asher & Adams' 1883 sheet, and combined with the same three states, with the Bahamas marked offshore, in Rogers & Johnston's earlier 1857 sheet, both broader regional groupings rather than a dedicated Florida portrait with its own Keys inset; this 1878 sheet is the only edition in the collection to map Florida alone with that inset included. It's printed unframed and available in a range of sizes to fit whatever wall it's headed for.