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Nice example of this detailed map showing the Official Post Offices and Postal Routes in Texas in the last decade of the 19th Century.
Details in the map include Railroads, Mail Messengers, and the frequency of delivery, including once a week, twice a week, three times a week, six times a week and "Special Supply." Discontinued Offices are shown, as are the beginnings and ends of each mail route.
Postal Maps in America date back to the mid-18th Century. The first Official Post map of the United States was published by Abraham Bradley in 1794. The tradition of regional Post maps began with David Burr in 1839 and was continued by W.L. Nicholson in the late 1860s. Charles Roeser's name begins to appear on Post Route maps in the 1880s, followed by Von Haake in the mid 1890s.
This map is dated 1889, with revisions to 1892.
All Texas Post Route maps are extremely rare on the market. We note a Preliminary post route map of the state of Texas : with adjacent parts of Louisiana, Arkansas and Indian Territory by W.L. Nicholson, first published in 1876 (42 x 38 inches) and a later Nicholson map of the Post Routes in Texas which was apparently first issued in 1878, with later editions to at least 1884 (including an 1883 edition offered for sale by Eberstadt in 1963 for $100).
We located no other recorded examples of this edition of the map (the copy in the Rumsey collection is a photograph of our copy of the map, posted in March 2013). We noted only a single example of this Roeser map (1894 edition) offered for sale by Goodspeed's in 1925. OCLC locates a single copy of the 1889 edition (University of Wisconsin Milwaukee, ex-American Geographical Society copy)and the 1891 edition (Boston Public Library).
The University of Virginia also holds an 1896 Von Haake Post Route Map of Texas.
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