Texas Map 1878 Railroad Print - Austin, Houston, Galveston

George Franklin Cram, working from his Western Map Depot in Chicago, published this Rail Road and County Map of Texas in 1878 as part of his Standard American Atlas of the United States, printed as an unusually tall, large-format sheet built specifically to accommodate the country's biggest state at a legible scale. This printing is hand-colored with county boundaries in red, drawn from the atlas's rare original plates rather than the smaller pocket editions Cram issued in later decades. Texas is mapped here at the height of its postwar cattle boom, a state whose open range and expanding rail network had, within a decade of the Civil War's end, made it the undisputed center of the country's cattle-driving economy, less than four decades after it had won independence from Mexico.

Austin anchors the map as the state capital, positioned on the Colorado River near the center of the settled portion of the state. Houston appears inland from the coast as a growing rail and commercial center, while Galveston, the state's principal Gulf port, handled the cotton and cattle shipments that Houston's rail lines funneled toward it. Cattle trails threading north out of the state toward the Kansas railheads mark the industry driving much of Texas's growth in this decade, and the Rio Grande traces the state's entire southern border with Mexico. Together the counties, the rail lines, and the cattle trails sketch a state whose frontier economy was expanding faster than almost any other in the atlas.

This sheet captures a specific and short-lived chapter in Texas history, one that resonates with a family descended from the cattle-driving era as much as with a collector drawn to the state at the peak of its open-range economy. The store also carries Texas from Cram's own later 1893 and 1883 editions, printed after barbed wire and the railroads themselves had ended the long cattle drives this map still shows in full swing, along with Bradford's 1838 atlas from decades before Texas even joined the Union; this 1878 sheet is the collection's only Texas map drawn squarely within the cattle-trail era. It's printed unframed and available in a range of sizes to fit whatever wall it's headed for.