Placerville, California, 1888 – Antique Wall Map
(Originally scanned by the Library of Congress. Each image is professionally and digitally cleaned of artifacts such as color bars and extra borders prior to printing.)
Description
Few images capture their era like this antique map of Placerville, California, 1888. An authentic image from the Library of Congress, it carries the weight of the real historical record.
Library of Congress record: Bird's eye view, Placerville, Cal
Framed, it is ready for the wall; unframed, it is ready for the frame you choose. A fine choice for anyone who loves history, and a gift that gets noticed. Free shipping in the lower 48 states. Snapshots of the Past has been bringing history to the wall since 2001, for tens of thousands of customers worldwide.
Placerville, California, 1888
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Placerville, the seat of El Dorado County in the Sierra Nevada foothills, was still living down its early name, Hangtown, when this bird's-eye view was drawn in 1888. The town had grown out of the gold rush of 1849, and by the late 1880s mining had given way to a mix of fruit orchards, vineyards, lumber, and trade with the farms and mining camps up the canyons. Its location on the old road between Sacramento and the high country made it a stop for freight wagons and stagecoaches, and residents of the period would have known it as a county town of courthouses, churches, stores, and hotels. The map records those streets and buildings at a time when the gold era was a memory and the town's future rested on agriculture and commerce.
| Created / published | 1888 |
|---|---|
| Creator | roethe, l. |
| Notes | An original bird's-eye view map of Placerville, California, drawn in 1888. Bird's-eye view maps were drawn by travelling artists who walked a town street by street, sketching every building from an imagined vantage point in the air, then sold the finished lithograph door to door by subscription. Roughly five thousand American towns were recorded this way between the 1860s and the 1920s, and for many of them the panoramic map is the most complete picture of the place that survives. Reproduced from the original in the Library of Congress collections. Printed to order on archival paper. Free shipping on all US orders. |
| Subjects | Panoramic maps--California |
| Source | Library of Congress, Panoramic Maps |
| Original scan | 8,672 × 6,432 px · prints to 29 × 21 in at 300 dpi |
| Library of Congress title | Bird's eye view, Placerville, Cal |
| Reference | AMZ-SOTP-OYK-487884 |
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