Maps

Six maps, largest first — the state the colonists landed in, the city they built, and the ground they built it from. Every one is drawn from primary records the project holds; the sources are named under each.

The state

• The geology of Texas

  The state's tilted belts by age, and the Dallas belt by formation — the Austin Chalk the colony stood on, the Eagle Ford shale under West Dallas, the lime and cement that came of them.

  USGS State Geologic Map Compilation, after the Bureau of Economic Geology

• Texas, 1850–1900

  The county lines at each census and the fifteen largest towns as the Almanac records them — Dallas a county seat of a few hundred in 1860, the largest town in Texas by 1890.

  Newberry Atlas of Historical County Boundaries · Texas Almanac

• Texas counties by population, 1850–2025

  Every county shaded by its census count on one scale across a hundred and seventy-five years, the fifteen most populous ranked; Dallas County first from 1890 to 1920, second to Harris since.

  Newberry atlas · Texas Almanac · Census Bureau PL 94-171 and Vintage 2025

The city

• Dallas city limits, 1855–2022

  The city annexing its way outward, assembled from the ordinances themselves — including the three of 1948 and 1952 that took in the colony land.

  City of Dallas GIS, annexations and historical city limits

• The two towns of 1855

  Dallas and La Réunion drawn from the point halfway between them, at one scale, in 1855 and again in 1875 when the railroads had come.

  City limits, NARN rail geometry, the project's own tracings

The colony

• The colony lands

  The 1858 holdings on the modern map and their afterlife in four chapters — colony, dispersal, East Dallas and cement, today — with the deed record behind each parcel.

  Deed scans, the 1858 plan, the Sam Street map of 1900, the project's abstracts

• The colony on its terrain

  Survey grants, present-day streets and buildings, and five-foot contours: the bluff the colonists chose and the limestone under it.

  USGS elevation, survey abstracts, OpenStreetMap

The sheets

• The map room

  The historical sheets themselves — the company's plans, the 1858 partition, the block books, Sam Street's 1900 map, the Sanborn and Kessler drawings — as documents, with what each one fed.

  Gallica, Dallas Historical Society, Dallas Public Library, Briscoe Center, and the project's scans