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Rare official GLO map showing Missouri in remarkable detail. County boundaries printed in red, with black detailing for rivers, railroads, land offices, county seats, and settlements. A key at lower left identifies U.S. Land Offices, principal railroad stations, and various administrative features.
This map is from the Atlas of the States and Territories over which Land Surveys have been Extended, produced by the General Land Office in 1878–79 under the direction of Charles Roeser, Jr., the GLO’s chief draughtsman. The atlas was a follow-up to the Centennial Atlas of 1876, reflecting the rapid expansion and settlement of the western states and territories in the wake of the Civil War, the Homestead Act, and railroad construction. Unlike commercially available maps, these official survey maps were produced for governmental use and distributed exclusively to members of Congress, government agencies, land offices, post offices, and railroads.
The General Land Office had been established in 1812 to oversee the surveying and distribution of public domain lands. While much of its early work focused on lands east of the Mississippi, the decades following the Civil War saw an unprecedented expansion of its surveying efforts into the western United States, fueled by settlement incentives and military campaigns. Between 1866 and 1876 alone, the GLO surveyed over 200 million acres, making its maps among the most accurate and authoritative of their time.
Julius Bien, one of the foremost American lithographers of the 19th century, employed advanced chromolithographic techniques to produce these large-scale maps with superior clarity and legibility. Given their official nature and limited distribution, maps from that atlas are rare in private hands today, with no copies recorded in the Streeter, Graff, or Rumsey collections.
The General Land Office (GLO) refers to the independent agency in the United States that was in charge of public domain lands. Created in 1812, it assumed the responsibilities for public domain lands from the United States Department of the Treasury. The Treasury had overseen the survey of the Northwest Territory, but as more area was added to the United States, a new agency was necessary to survey the new lands.
Eventually, the GLO would be responsible for the surveying, platting, and sale of the majority of the land west of the Mississippi, with the exception of Texas. When the Secretary of the Interior was created in 1849, the GLO was placed under its authority. Until the creation of the Forest Service in 1905, the GLO also managed forest lands that had been removed from public domain. In additional to managing the fees and sales of land, the GLO produced maps and plans of the areas and plots they surveyed. In 1946, the GLO merged with the United States Grazing Service to become the Bureau of Land Management.
