1938 Rand McNally Pictorial Tourist Map of Florida

This is a 1938 Rand McNally and Company pictorial tourist map of Florida. Pictorial vignettes highlight tourist activities, modern conveniences (airplanes and automobiles), and tourist sites, including Bok Tower and Silver Springs. Everglades National Park (which would not be officially established until 1949) is labeled as a 'project'. Red lines highlight state and federal highways. A table containing illustrations of thirty-two different fish that can be caught off Florida's coast occupies the left border. It provides potential fishermen with information on where each species is caught and what time of year is best for each one. Nineteen of these fish have a number associated with them, which is used as an identifier for the small illustrations along the coastline. A hunter's guide appears along the left border as well.

Verso Content

Multiple smaller maps illustrating many of Florida's cities are printed on the map's verso. The largest of these does not focus on a city. Instead, it depicts the Florida Panhandle from Tallahassee west to the Alabama border. The other maps highlight Jacksonville, St. Petersburg, Tampa, Orlando, West Palm Beach, Palm Beach, Miami, and Miami Beach. A small map of Cuba, then a popular tourist destination, particularly from southern Florida, occupies the lower right corner.

Publication History and Census

This map was created by Rand McNally and Company for Gulf Oil and was published in 1938, with later editors appearing well into the 1950s. An example of this map is part of the collection at the Touchton Map Library at the Tampa Bay History Center. We also note four examples cataloged in OCLC which are part of the collections at the Newberry Library, the University of Kansas, Stanford University, and the Bibliothèque nationale de France.