Texas in 1852 - Austin, Houston, San Antonio

Samuel Augustus Mitchell of Philadelphia published this map of the State of Texas in 1852, issued in his enduringly popular School and Family Geography, one of the works that helped make Mitchell's firm one of the most prominent atlas publishers in antebellum America. Mitchell had built his reputation two decades earlier by acquiring the rights to Anthony Finley's New American Atlas and steadily expanding it with new towns, roads, and detail, and this Texas sheet carries that same emphasis on density, naming counties, towns, forts, rivers, and Indian lands across the state's still-enormous frontier reach. Dedicated insets of Galveston and the state's northern tip round out the main map. It depicts Texas only seven years after it joined the Union in 1845, a young state still absorbing the vast unorganized western counties it had carried over from its decade as an independent republic.

Austin, chosen as the Republic of Texas's capital in 1839 for its central, defensible location on the Colorado River, continues as state capital and anchors the map's interior. Houston, founded in 1836 and named for the hero of San Jacinto, appears as the state's commercial hub, its position on Buffalo Bayou linking it toward the Gulf via the Galveston inset. San Antonio, the oldest of the three, centers the map's southern reaches near the Alamo and the string of Spanish missions that had shaped the region for a century before Texas independence. Forts and Indian lands stretch across the map's western frontier, a reminder of how much of the state remained beyond organized settlement even seven years into statehood.

This map suits a Texas family, an Austin, Houston, or San Antonio transplant, or a collector building out the state's earliest atlas maps from the years just after statehood. The store also carries H. H. Lloyd's 1872 Texas map, issued two decades later after Reconstruction-era county expansion had reshaped the state considerably; this earlier Mitchell edition instead captures Texas while its western frontier was still overwhelmingly Indian land and unorganized county space. It is available unframed in a range of sizes.