Antique Nevada Map, Engraved by L. L. Poates Eng. Co. New York, Framed, c. 1911–1930

The Piece

A hand-colored lithographed map of Nevada, framed behind glass in a linen-wrapped mat with a slim gilt fillet. The state is washed in soft yellow with pale green relief shading along the mountain ranges and blue for the lakes, and the whole surface is crowded with the fine black type of a working reference map — every railroad line, every siding, every camp.

Reading it is the pleasure. Reno, Sparks, Carson City, Virginia City, Elko, Ely, Winnemucca and Tonopah are all here in heavy face — and so are hundreds of places that no longer exist. Metropolis sits in the northeast, the irrigation colony that failed. Rhyolite and Bullfrog are marked near Beatty. Goldfield is a major town. Las Vegas appears as a small dot on a rail line in the far south, one name among many rather than the anchor of the state. Owens Lake and Tulare Lake are both shown full and blue in the California margin.

The sheet is page 114, and the plate is signed at lower left: NEVADA, ENGRAVED BY L. L. POATES ENG. CO., N.Y.

History & Provenance

The L. L. Poates Engraving Company of New York was among the significant American map engravers of the early twentieth century, supplying plates to atlas publishers for decades. This sheet comes from The Popular Atlas of the World, a blue pebbled-cloth volume with a gilt-stamped globe on the cover — the household atlas of its era, the book a family kept by the dictionary and consulted when the newspaper mentioned somewhere they'd never heard of. The atlas retains its original owner's inscription in ink on the front pastedown: Mercer, 140 Valleyview Dr., Dayton, O.

The map dates itself, if you read it carefully. Two features bracket it precisely:

Metropolis is shown, in northeastern Elko County. The town was founded in 1911 as a promoted irrigation colony, lost its water rights in litigation, and emptied out over the following two decades. Its presence sets the earliest possible date.

Boulder City and Lake Mead are absent. The Colorado runs unimpeded along the southeastern border. Hoover Dam construction began in 1931, Boulder City was founded that same year, and Lake Mead began filling in 1935. Their absence sets the latest.

Two more details support the range. Owens Lake is shown as open blue water — the Los Angeles Aqueduct began draining it in 1913 and it was essentially dry by the mid-1920s. And the entire Bullfrog–Rhyolite–Goldfield–Tonopah mining district appears at full extent, the boom that defined Nevada between 1905 and the First World War.

This is Nevada in the window between the mining rush and the dam — before Las Vegas was anything, when the state's center of gravity was still in the north.

Product Details

Why It Belongs in Your Home

Nevadans buy Nevada. An antique map of the state is one of the few pieces of art that is genuinely local, genuinely old, and immediately legible to anyone who lives here — every visitor walks up to it, finds Reno, and then starts looking for the towns that are gone. It hangs beautifully in an office, a study, a hallway, or above a bar, and the soft yellow-and-blue palette is easy against wood, plaster, or a dark painted wall.

It also makes an unusually good gift, and one that means something: for someone who moved here, someone who left, or anyone whose family has been in the state longer than the dam has.