Description

This information-packed large format map showcases all of Florida during an especially important historical juncture, between its railway boom’, led by Henry Flagler, and its Roaring Twenties ‘land boom’, which created the modern state.  To a scale of 10 miles to 1 inch, the map was made by Florida’s Department of Agriculture, as both as practical aid and a promotional piece to attract investors to what was America’s fastest growing jurisdiction.  The map details the shorelines of all of the Florida’s extensive coastlines and inland waters and shows all its topographical features predicated upon the best official surveys.  Importantly, the map showcases the rapidly expanding railway, roads and canal systems that fueled the state’s rise into a tourism and agricultural powerhouse.

While most of the state is showcased upon the main part of the map, due to Florida’s unusual elongated shape, the western part of its panhandle, beyond the Apalachicola River, is captured in the inset in the lower left corner, as the ‘Western Part of Florida / Same Scale as Main Map’.

Florida’s railway system, which had been in a state of hyper-expansion since the 1880s, was the lifeblood of its development.  The ‘Reference’, located below the title, details the various lines in colour-coding, including the: Atlantic Coast Line (Red); Florida East Coast R.R. (Green); Seaboard Air Line (Blue); Georgia Southern & Florida R.R. (Brown); Louisville & Nashville R.R. (Olive); Other Railroads (Black); and Proposed Railroads (Dotted lines).

Of particular note is the Florida East Coast Railway, established in 1885, which aimed to connect the underdeveloped Atlantic littoral of Florida to the rest of America, so spurring population and economic growth.  The line was spearheaded by the Standard Oil tycoon Henry Flagler, popularly known as the ‘Father’ of both Palm Beach and Miami.  The railway, which commenced in Jacksonville, reached West Palm Beach in 1894, and Biscayne Bay (today’s Downtown Miami) in 1896.  By 1912, the railway was completed to Key West, travelling across a great system of bridges that was one of the America’s great marvels of engineering.

Additionally, that map labels the state’s increasingly extensive canal system, in particular the channels maintained by the ‘Florida Coast Line Canal and Transportation Co.’, including

‘Canals cut through Land’ and ‘Improved Channels in Water’.  Of note, the map delineates the entire passage of the ‘Inside Channel’ which ran from Jacksonville along the inland waters all the way down to Key West.

Also labeled are the routes of the steamship lines, including the P&O line from Miami to Nassau and the Peninsular and Occidental route from Tampa to Key West and then on to Havana.

The work is entitled as a ‘Sectional’ map, as the entire state is shown to be overlaid by a system of grids, as described in the ‘Explanation’ (below the Reference).  The surveyors’ grid, which commenced from a baseline running through Tallahassee, shows the state divided into ‘townships’ of 6 miles square, and which are further segmented into 36 sections of one square mile each.  This ‘range system’ was used to create cadastral units for sale, especially in newly developing regions.  This process would be especially useful during the ‘land boom’ that was to commence shortly after the present map was issued.

Interestingly, the map features a chart of the ‘Population by Counties / State Census, 1915’, that shows that Florida then had a total population of 921,618.  Its most populous county was Duval (home to Jacksonville) with 94,834 residents, followed by Hillsborough (containing Tampa) with 83,682.  These statistics reveal that many of the counties that are today among the state’s most populous were then only lightly inhabited.  Dade County (containing Miami) then had only 24,536 residents; Orange (home to Orlando) had only 15,397; while Broward (containing Fort Lauderdale) had a population of only 4,763.  For context, in 1900 Florida had population of 528,542, while the by 1930 it would grow to 1,468,211 (today Florida is home to around 22 million people!!!)

Florida’s Department of Agriculture, which had an outsized role in the state’s development, commissioned the first edition of its official large format ‘Sectional Maps’ of Florida in 1888, published in Buffalo, New York, by the Matthews-Northrup Works.  Regularly updated editions were issued thereafter, at least until 1946, making the series the ultimate record of Florida’s development.

The present example of the map is unusually fine, for it was contemporarily mounted upon linen, with marbled endpapers, in London by the firm of Edward Stanford Ltd. (please see the pastedown labels to the verso and lower-right margin of the map), the world’s leading cartographic publisher and map seller.  This proves that the Florida Department of Agriculture’s ‘Sectional Maps’ had a wide audience, consulted by potential investors in the state’s booming tourism, agriculture and land speculation sectors all over the world.  The present example of the map would have been used by one of the many British stakeholders who were known to have claimed a place in the Sunshine State.

 

A Note on Rarity

All issues of the Department of Agriculture’s ‘Sectional Map’ series depicting aal of Florida are scarce, with editions issued before 1920 being rare to extremely rare.

We can trace only 2 examples of the 1917 edition of the map, held by the Stanford University Library and the University of Chicago Library.  Moreover, we are not aware of any sales records for another example.

 

The Rise of Modern Florida

Up to the 1880s, Florida was considered to be a backwater, almost inaccessible from America’s major population centres, and largely forgotten.  Only the Panhandle and the northern tier (a line running from Pensacola, Tallahassee to Jacksonville and then down a bit to St. Augustine), as well as the trading port of Key West (at the extreme southern tip of the state) were well developed.  Virtually all of Peninsular Florida was scarcely settled, with only an archipelago of trading posts and military forts dotting the coasts.  While the region was home to some fine natural harbours (Tampa Bay, Biscayne Bay), the region was generally considered to be a giant malarial swamp that had stymied early attempts at improvement.

In the early 1880s, Henry Flagler (1830 – 1913), one of America’s great tycoons due to his role as one of the founders of Standard Oil, came to believe that Florida possessed immeasurable potential for agriculture and tourism.  He held that if the right infrastructure and organization could be developed, that investors, settlers and tourists would arrive in droves, transforming Florida into America’s hottest property.  At first, Flagler’s dream seemed far-fetched; however, he never did anything in half measure, and had the money and drive to match his bold vision.

Flagler’s dream coincided with other developments.  In 1883, the Pensacola and Atlantic Railway was built, connecting Pensacola to the rest of the Panhandle, while 1884 the South Florida Railway connected the excellent port of Tampa Bay to rest of America.

Most notably, however, Flagler’s Florida East Coast Railway (FEC), the building of which commenced in 1885 from Jacksonville southwards, reached West Palm Beach in 1894, and what would become Miami in 1896.  The FEC allowed farmers to expand citrus growing and ranching all along the Atlantic littoral, transforming the region into an agrarian superpower.  The small villages and forts along the coast rapidly developed into large towns and cities, as settlers from the cold north moved in to seek their place in the sun, while land speculators from all over the world sought to cash in on the wave.  Moreover, thousands of tourists flocked to the new hotels and resorts that were built near the railway.  These developments laid the foundation for the state’s future growth; the preset map was made towards the end of this period.

What followed in the 1920s, was a hyper-driven ‘land boom’, were investors, no doubt pouring over editions of ‘Sectional Maps’ sought to buy up parcels of undeveloped swampland and savanna in the hope that they would be designated as future town sites, railway lines, ranches, citrus groves and hotels.  While Florida’s boom went dramatically bust during the Great Depression, from the 1940s Florida met a resurgence and has never looked back since.

 

References: Stanford University Library: G3930 1917 .F6; University of Chicago Library: G3930 1917 .F5; OCLC: 28775446.