Nevada & California Map 1873 County Print - Las Vegas, Los Angeles, San Francisco

H.H. Lloyd's county map of Nevada and California appeared in the early 1870s within atlases published by Warner & Beers, part of the same Atlas of the United States series that produced the firm's other rare territorial sheets of the period. The map is colored by county and records towns, railroads, roads, rivers, mountains, dry lakes and Indian tribal territory across both states, three years after the Nevada and California map's 1870 first edition, giving this issue a slightly more developed rail network to record. Its Southern California counties remain genuinely primitive by later standards, predating the creation of Ventura, Orange, Imperial and Riverside counties, all of which would later be carved out of the handful of oversized jurisdictions shown here.

Virginia City continues to anchor Nevada's Comstock mining district, while Sacramento governs California as its capital on the Sacramento River. Los Angeles appears as a modest southern California town, still decades away from the population boom that would eventually justify subdividing its surrounding county into the four smaller counties later split from it. San Bernardino and Los Angeles counties together cover most of the state's southern desert and coastal reaches on this map, their county lines drawn across vast stretches of dry lake beds and mountain ranges that would remain sparsely populated for years to come. Railroads and stage roads link the state's mining and agricultural centers across an otherwise still largely open landscape.

This map is a fitting gift for a California or Nevada family with roots in the pre-subdivision era of the state's southern counties, or for a collector interested in how Southern California's modern county map only gradually emerged from a handful of oversized nineteenth-century jurisdictions. Compared to the store's 1870 Lloyd Nevada and California sheet, this 1873 edition shows a state map only a few years further along, useful for tracking how quickly the rail network and county lines continued to shift. It is offered unframed in a full range of sizes, from a compact print for a study to a large-format piece for an office or den.