Florida in 1892 - Jacksonville, Tampa, Key West, St. Augustine

Rand, McNally & Company published this map of Florida in 1892 for their Indexed Atlas of the World, printed in this edition alongside the full returns of the 1890 federal census and built for a business and shipping audience tracking the state's fast-growing rail network. Florida in the early 1890s was in the middle of a genuine transformation, its railroads pushing steadily south into territory that had been nearly inaccessible only a decade earlier, opening new land to citrus growers, developers, and the first wave of Gilded Age tourists. This large, detailed sheet includes an inset of the southern peninsula on an enlarged scale, a reflection of just how much new interest that region was attracting.

Jacksonville, Florida's largest city and principal rail gateway from the north, anchors the map's northeast corner. Tampa, on the Gulf coast, was entering a boom of its own following Henry Plant's railroad extension, while Key West, reachable only by sea at this date, remained Florida's most populous city and a key naval and cigar-manufacturing port. St. Augustine, the nation's oldest continuously occupied European settlement, appears along the northeast coast just as Henry Flagler's hotel building was about to transform it into a fashionable winter resort. The map's inset of the southern peninsula on an enlarged scale reflects the growing national curiosity about Florida's least developed region.

This 1892 Rand McNally sheet documents Florida just before the coming Flagler and Plant railroad booms fully reshaped the state's east and west coasts, a useful counterpart to the 1899 Cram railway atlas map of Florida also offered in this collection, which shows the state only seven years later once that transformation was well underway. This piece is a strong choice for a Florida native, a Jacksonville or Tampa transplant, or a collector of Gilded Age Florida maps. It ships unframed and is available in multiple sizes.