Between the Covers

Unbound. Color lithograph folding map. Measuring 16" x 8½". Old machine folds. Very near fine. This map depicts the small mining town of Silver City, Nevada, which was at the southern edge of the Comstock Lode. The lode runs directly through town from north to south, and the intersecting claims of the two companies in question, Lower Comstock Mining and Emigrant Mining, are shaded in pink and yellow. The peripheral claims of two other companies, Dayton Mining and Silver Hill Mining, are shown in green and blue.

A scarce Nevada mining claim map lithographed by one of the first professional African-American artists in the West. Grafton Brown was the son of a freedman, born in Pennsylvania in 1841. He moved to San Francisco in 1861, and spent much of the next few years as a draftsman and lithographer for the firm Kuchel & Dresser and as a traveling artist in Nevada. He set up his own lithography company in San Francisco in 1867, which he operated until 1879. By the 1880s, he had turned his attention to painting, which he did in the Canadian and American West, including for the Bowman Geological Survey, before he moved to Minnesota in 1893, where he remained for the rest of his life.

An attractive map by an important figure in African-American art and illustration. *OCLC* locates nine copies.

Item #432035