Mexico Map 1856 Regional Print - Mexico City, Tehuantepec, Chihuahua

G.W. Colton engraved this map of Mexico for his family's New York publishing house, J.H. Colton & Company, including it in Colton's Atlas of the World, a volume accompanied by geographical, statistical and historical text from Dr. Richard Swainson Fisher and widely regarded as one of the finest and most accurate American atlases of its period. The Colton firm had built its reputation on exactly this combination, technically polished engraving paired with genuinely researched supporting text, and this Mexico sheet reflects that standard, with each state tinted individually in full color and its recently redrawn northern boundary with the United States marked in a bold pink line impossible to miss at a glance. Published in 1856, just two years after the Gadsden Purchase finalized the last adjustment to that boundary, the map captures Mexico in the immediate aftermath of losing nearly half its prewar territory.

Mexico City anchors the map's political center, its position reinforced by the atlas's accompanying statistical and historical text rather than by decoration on the sheet itself. The Isthmus of Tehuantepec receives its own dedicated inset, underscoring the same American commercial interest in a trans-isthmian route that appears across several contemporary Mexico sheets. Chihuahua sprawls across the map's northern reaches, its boundary with the United States now drawn according to the Gadsden Purchase line rather than the more generous pre-1853 claim shown on earlier maps in this collection. Mountain ranges and river systems throughout the country are marked in enough detail to support the atlas's broader educational ambitions, consistent with Fisher's accompanying descriptive text.

An ideal gift for a collector of American commercial atlas publishing at its technical peak, or for anyone whose family history touches the post-Gadsden Purchase Mexican border this map so plainly marks. TheMapVault also carries Schonberg's Mexico maps from the following decade; where those later sheets reflect an even further-updated border and add extensive Central American detail, this 1856 Colton map captures the boundary in its first few years after the Gadsden adjustment, paired with the scholarly text Fisher contributed to the wider atlas. It's available unframed, in the full range of nine sizes.