Georgia, Alabama & Florida Map 1858 Regional Print - Savannah, Montgomery, Key West

This map of Georgia, Alabama, and Florida was drawn by G.W. Colton with text by Richard Swainson Fisher and published in 1858 in Colton's Illustrated Cabinet Atlas and Descriptive Geography, a smaller and less expensive alternative to Colton's large folio and wall-map lines, aimed at readers who wanted the geography without the specialist's price tag. The sheet colors each state's counties individually, sets the title in a formal serif type within an ornamental floral border, and carries a separate inset of the Florida Keys highlighting Key West, all engraved by Davies and Roberts and George Russell and Co. Published only a few years before the Civil War, the map depicts three Deep South states whose economies and county governments were, by 1858, deeply organized around cotton, rice, and plantation agriculture.

Georgia is shown with its counties finely subdivided, a reflection of the state's dense plantation-belt settlement stretching from the Piedmont down toward the coast at Savannah, long the state's busiest port for cotton bound overseas. Alabama appears centered on its interior capital at Montgomery, seated on the Alabama River at the heart of the state's cotton country and connected downstream to the Gulf port of Mobile. Florida is by far the least settled of the three, its peninsula thinly marked compared to its neighbors, with the separate Florida Keys inset drawing out Key West as a distinct maritime outpost far to the south. Seen together, the three states trace a gradient from Georgia's dense plantation counties to Florida's still-sparse frontier.

A Georgia or Alabama cotton-belt family, a Florida transplant curious about the state before its peninsula filled in, or a collector building out the Deep South from Colton's 1858 atlas will all find something here. Key West enthusiasts in particular will appreciate the separate Florida Keys inset carried on this sheet, an early cartographic look at a place most contemporary maps skipped entirely. It is available unframed in a full range of sizes, from a compact study print to a larger statement piece.