1880 Texas General Land Office Map of Jackson County

A rare 1880 plat map of Jackson County, Texas, produced by the Texas General Land Office and printed (lithographed) by August Gast. It depicts the county on the eve of an important transformation brought by the railroad.

A Closer Look

Jackson County is situated midway down the Texas coast, about midway between Houston and Corpus Christi. Much of the county originally consisted of coastal prairies and the rivers and bays seen here provide access to the Gulf of Mexico.

By the time this map was produced, Jackson had been in existence for nearly 50 years, having been founded in 1836 (named for Andrew Jackson) as a municipality within Mexican Texas and then as one of the original counties of the independent Republic of Texas. As such, it was an early site of settlement for members of the 'Old Three Hundred' families who purchased parcels of land from Stephen Austin's land grant in the early 1820s. As with the wider region around the old Spanish Presidio La Bahía, Jackson County had originally been home primarily to Karankawa people, who had a difficult relationship with the Spanish before being driven out of the area by settlers in the 1820s - 1850s. During the Texas Revolution, many residents fled and their farms were burned by Santa Anna's troops.

Compared to a contemporary map of neighboring Calhoun County recently sold by us (CalhounCounty-texasglo-1879), there are more Anglos and less Tejanos among the landowners of Jackson County. As in Calhoun County, there does appear to have been noticeable but not absolute spatial segregation between the two groups. In this case, Tejanos mostly reside west of the Lavaca River and Anglos to the east. Unsurprisingly, some landowners owned property in both counties.

Notable among the landholders indicated here are Texas founding fathers Stephen Austin and Sam Houston, both long deceased by the time this map was published, but their property had presumably been retained by descendants. Though no railroad existed at this time in the county, the International-Great Northern Railroad owned tracts of land in the county. However, it was another company, the New York, Texas and Mexican Railway, that first built a railroad there.

In the mid-19th century, Texana emerged as the main town in the county, but the overall population remained small and agrarian, with as much as one-half of the county's population being enslaved, tasked with growing cotton and sugarcane. In the years immediately following this map's publication, the Italian-born railroad entrepreneur Joseph (Guiseppe) Telfener built the New York, Texas and Mexican Railway through Jackson County. The residents of Texana were ambivalent about the project because they thought it would threaten the town's maritime shipping, so a station was built to the west, closer to the Lavaca River. Edna, named for one of Telfener's daughters, quickly outgrew Texana as a result, and was made the county seat in 1883. By 1884, Texana was a virtual ghost town and today only exists as a historical site within Edna.

Publication History and Census

This map was prepared by the Texas General Land Office and printed by August Gast in 1880. We note it among the holdings of the University of Houston, the Library of Congress, and Texas A and M University, and it has no known history on the market. A later edition was published in 1896 and is similarly scarce.