About the Holdings

The Florida Historical Map Collection is one of the treasures of the P.K. Yonge Library of Florida History and contains more than 2300 renderings of Florida dating from the mid-1500s to the twentieth century.  The earliest original printed map in the collection is Girolamo Ruscelli’s Nueva hispania tabula nova, [Venice, 1561].

Approximately half of the images in the Historical Map Collection are original prints or drawings.  The collection also contains facsimiles of maps held at other repositories and duplicated. 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 1584, 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 hand-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 significant mapmakers and cartographers, such as Guillaume Delisle, Jacques Nicolas Bellin, Johann Baptist Homann, and Thomas Jefferys, are prominently represented in the collection.

Maps are housed as part of the Map and Imagery Library on the first floor of the George A. Smathers Library.