Austin Map of Texas, 1830

The story of this map

Stephen F. Austin, the man who led the first American colonists into Mexican Texas, drew this map himself and had it published in Philadelphia by Henry S. Tanner in 1830. It was meant to bring settlers, and it did: for years it was the map of Texas, the one people unfolded when they decided to go.

It is a black-line engraving on cream paper, and its beauty is in the drawing. The rivers fan across the sheet from the Sabine to the Rio Grande, the Gulf coast is carefully traced, and the great empresario grants, Austin’s own colony among them, are laid out along the Brazos and Colorado. Beyond the settled fringe the map grows sparse, with open country and the names of the peoples who lived there. Six years before the Republic, it shows Texas as a promise rather than a fact.

This is a map for Texans, for ranch houses and Hill Country porches, for offices in Houston and Austin, and for anyone whose family arrived with the old three hundred. It anchors the southwestern corner of our Antique Maps of US States collection.

Printed to order on archival matte paper and framed in the country of delivery.

Before and after

Left: the archive scan exactly as published. Right: the file that goes to the printer.

Archive scanRestored

Restoration notes

Restoration plan: the Library's copy is torn along its fold lines and is missing parts of the scale bar and scale statement at the lower right, so the tears will be mended digitally and the fold lines toned; the lost portion of the scale bar will be left as a quiet blank rather than redrawn; crop scan margins, balance colour cast and levels while keeping the paper tone, remove library stamps and scanner artefacts if present, gentle sharpening. No repainting of original content.

Every print carries its archive credit on the packing slip. Paper tone and small imperfections of the original are kept on purpose; nothing is redrawn.