- Title: City of Galveston Texas
- Author: O. W. Gray & Son
- Date: 1884
- Medium: Hand-colored engraving
- Condition: Very Good - age toning, wear along issued center fold, light foxing, minor paper loss in left and right margins at fold
- Inches: 24 1/4 x 15 3/4 [Paper]
- Centimeters: 61.6 x 40.1 [Paper]
- Product ID: 313015
Very rare map of Galveston, Texas.
Fine 1884 pre-hurricane Galveston, Texas map from O.W. Gray's scarce National Atlas. Drawn by Frank Gray, this piece was published in the period between the Civil War and the devastating storm of 1900, a time of reconstruction and expansion for Galveston and the South as a whole. This map, one of the most decorative nineteenth-century maps ever drawn of Galveston, contains immense detail, showing many almost-forgotten features of the city. The depictions of public buildings, railroads, and street railways are especially interesting.
In the 1880's, O.W. Gray & Son regularly published atlases of the world with a focus on the United States. Representatives of the firm traveled across the country to sell atlas subscriptions with an interesting pitch: subscribers who paid in advance would have their property or business labelled on the map of their city. Gray made sure to include in these maps the prominent families and citizens of note belonging to each city.
The local editions of Gray’s atlas maps rarely come to market, the map of Galveston perhaps never.
From O.W. Grays’s THE NATIONAL ATLAS : CONTAINING ELABORATE TOPOGRAPHICAL MAPS OF THE UNITED STATES AND THE DOMINION OF CANADA, WITH PLANS OF CITIES AND GENERAL MAPS OF THE WORLD; ALSO, DESCRIPTIONS AND TABLES, HISTORICAL AND STATISTICAL, WITH A REFERENCE LIST CONTAINING THE NAMES OF THE CITIES, TOWN, VILLAGES, AND POST-OFFICES IN THE UNITED STATES, WITH THEIR LOCATION, ACCOMPANIED BY SPECIAL RAILWAY, AND SCIENTIFIC MAPS AND ARTICLES.
Rarity: Unrecorded in OCLC. No sales records. One institutional copy held at UT Arlington.