Texas in 1857 - Austin, Houston, Galveston, Corpus Christi

This map of Texas was produced by Henry Darwin Rogers and Alexander Keith Johnston and published in 1857 in their Atlas of the United States of North America, Canada, and the Adjacent Countries, an unusual transatlantic collaboration between an American professor, a Scottish geographer, and the London publisher Edward Stanford. The maps in this atlas were engraved and drawn by Johnston's Edinburgh firm to a uniform scale of fifty-four and a half miles to the inch, and are considered among the finest examples of detailed Scottish mapmaking applied to the American West in the years before the Civil War, with Texas shown in outline color and its counties delineated in orange. It depicts the state twelve years after Texas joined the Union, a period of rapid county formation and land settlement as Americans pushed westward ahead of the sectional crisis to come.

The Rio Grande is traced along the length of the map, marking Texas's long southern and western boundary with Mexico. The Colorado River is shown cutting through the center of the state, one of the principal waterways around which Texas's early counties and settlements took shape. Corpus Christi is marked along the Gulf coast, a small but growing port that had served as a staging ground during the Mexican-American War only a decade earlier. County boundaries are drawn in fine orange outline across the map, reflecting the rapid subdivision of Texas land in the decade after statehood. Together these features present a state still being organized on paper even as its rivers, ports and proposed railroads pointed toward its future growth.

This map makes a fitting gift for anyone with family roots in Texas from the years before the Civil War, or for a collector drawn to the precision of mid-nineteenth-century Scottish cartography. Texas buyers should note we also carry the state as mapped by H.H. Lloyd in 1873 and by John Bartholomew in 1856: this 1857 Rogers and Johnston edition sits between the two, a detailed antebellum view of Texas quite distinct from the later railroad-era Lloyd map or the earlier joint Texas-New Mexico sheet by Bartholomew; note this same 1857 Rogers and Johnston edition is also offered elsewhere in our catalog under a different crop selection, so the underlying map and year are the same, only the image crops differ. It is available unframed in a full range of sizes, from a compact study print to a larger statement piece.