New Mexico in 1909 - Santa Fe, Albuquerque, Roswell

This map of New Mexico was published in 1909 by George Franklin Cram and Ellis Arthur Davis as part of Davis' New Commercial Encyclopedia of the Pacific Northwest, a regional atlas issued out of Berkeley for readers tracking the development of the western states and territories. The sheet is printed in full color by county, with the mountainous terrain shown in hachures, a practical style suited to an atlas aimed at settlers and businessmen rather than purely decorative collecting. It covers New Mexico in its final years as a federal territory, three years before statehood arrived in 1912, recording counties, settlements, railroads, and Indian reservations at a point when homesteading and mineral development were pushing population growth across the territory.

Santa Fe, the territorial capital since Spanish colonial days, remained the seat of government at the head of the old Santa Fe Trail. Albuquerque, built up by the Atchison, Topeka and Santa Fe Railway, had become the territory's largest town and its commercial center by this date. Roswell, out on the Pecos Valley plain to the southeast, anchored a growing irrigated farming district built around artesian wells, while Raton, near the Colorado line, served the territory's coal-mining north. Together these towns show a territory whose growth by 1909 stretched from the old Camino Real in the north to the newly irrigated ranchlands of the southeastern plains.

This map makes a fitting gift for anyone with family roots in Santa Fe, Albuquerque, or the Pecos Valley around Roswell, or for a collector of early twentieth-century territorial maps of the Southwest. New Mexico buyers should note we also carry the territory as mapped by Cram in 1882: this 1909 edition, printed in full machine color near the very end of the territorial period, offers a later and more settled view of New Mexico than the earlier hand-colored railroad map. It is available unframed in a full range of sizes, from a compact study print to a larger statement piece.