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Unrecorded General Land Office Map of Wood County Texas with Contemporary Annotations, Listing all Landowners.
Fantastic early map of Wood County, Texas, published by a real estate firm headed by the former treasurer of the Republic of Texas.
The map shows all parcels of land in the county alongside their landowners, some of which have been further annotated in an early hand. Rivers and streams are shown, and adjacent counties are named. The map was surveyed by the General Land Office and published for “Jas H. Starr & Son,” James H. Starr’s real estate and banking firm, one of the first in the state.
Considerable landholdings of Nacogdoches University, the first nonsectarian institution of higher learning in Texas, are shown. Almost 30,000 acres were granted by the Republic of Texas to support its mission of accessible education regardless of religious affiliation.
Wood County was established in 1850, when it was separated from Van Zandt County, which now lies to the south across the Sabine River. The county was named for George Tyler Wood, the second governor of Texas. In the 1860s, Wood County had a significant enslaved population, and a large majority of the population voted for secession. Railroads arrived in 1873, which caused a second boom in the county. Today, Wood County is an oil-producing county lying 70 miles east of downtown Dallas.
The map is an early example of photolithography and was printed by the pioneering American Photo-Lithographic Company in Brooklyn. The company had exclusive rights to the Irish inventor John Walter Osborne’s namesake process, which he developed while surveying in Australia. Osborne moved to America in 1862 to monetize his invention and died in Palo Alto in 1902.
Rarity
No other examples traced.
