Antique Maps at the Map & Imagery Library: Florida History Map Collection

The Florida History Map Collection is one of the treasures of the Map and Imagery Library and contains more than 2300 images of Florida dating from the 1500s to 1926.  The earliest original printed map in the collection is Girolamo Ruscelli's Nueva hispania tabula nova, [Venice, 1574]. 

Approximately half of the images in the collection are original prints or drawings.  The collection also contains images of important Florida maps held by other institutions and reproduced as photographic or photostatic duplicates in our collection. These reproductions feature items from the National Archives, Library of Congress, Archivo General de Indias (Seville), Public Record Office (London), and other museums and libraries.  

In our collections you can see examples of such beautiful maps as the hand-colored Abraham Ortelius map of Florida from the Additamentum, Theatrum Orbis Terrarum, of 1592, which shows Native American towns mentioned in the de Soto chronicles, or the 1606 Mercator and Hondius map of Virginiae Item et Floridae with its inset of Timucua Indians. The English attack on St. Augustine in 1740 is depicted in a gracefully tinted work by Thomas Silver, and you can chart a route along Florida's coast through Bernard Roman's Gulf and Windward Pilot of 1794. The works of other important mapmakers and cartographers, such as Guillaume Delisle, Jacques Nicolas Bellin, Johann Baptist Homann, and Thomas Jefferys, are prominently represented in the collection.

For more Florida history information:

P.K. Yonge Library of Florida History