The automobile age in the United States was still young in the early 1920s when Rand McNally published this road map of Florida for the Texas Oil Company (Texaco). Automobiles were introduced to the American public in 1896, but relatively few people owned them until after 1908, when Ford's Model T, the first great inexpensive car, appeared on the market. Thereafter, the American appetite for motor vehicles was insatiable. By 1916 Americans owned 3.3 million automobiles; by 1929 there were 29 million cars on the road, or roughly one for every four Americans. Today, most Americans regard their cars as necessities, but in the early decades of the twentieth century, motoring was regarded as a form of recreation. Weekend joyrides in the country were common, and by the 1920s, millions of Americans were taking longer car trips every year covering hundreds, even thousands of miles.

At first, they were obliged to use extremely poor roads. In 1914, the United States had only 29,000 miles of paved roads. Most of these were concentrated around major cities. Rural roads were extremely poor, and poorly marked as well. Without adequate signs, it was easy to lose one's way, and even well marked roads were occasionally impassable. Under these conditions, road maps were often useless. To get from place to place, many people relied on written descriptions of major routes published in bulky "blue books" published by the Automobile Blue Book Company. Each route "log" carefully guided motorists from one place to the next, noting each turn, fork, or crossroad, landmark, and the miles between each feature. (A passage from a Blue Book is included in this unit as one of the supplemental documents.)

Road conditions slowly improved during the later 1910s and early 1920s thanks in part to the efforts of automobile clubs and highway associations dedicated to the cause of good roads. These groups identified important cross-country and regional "trails," giving them colorful or historical names, such as the Lincoln Highway, the Midland Trail, the Pikes Peak Ocean to Ocean Highway, the Yellowstone Trail, and the Dixie Highway. Some of these groups set aside money for road improvements. In 1916 and 1921, the first federal road aid laws were passed, providing federal funds to support the construction of post roads (roads maintained for the movement of mail) and "interstate" highways. Several states began to number their important highways about 1920, and in 1925, a federal law was passed creating a national system of numbered federal highways-one of which was the now famous Route 66. Our core map, however, dates from the period when the named auto trails still ruled the countryside. You will find 15 of these roads marked on the map, including the Dixie Highway, the Tamiani Trail, the Old Spanish Trail, and the Atlantic Highway. Each of these highways had distinctive colored signs that their sponsors and local highway officials placed on telephone poles or signposts at regular intervals along the road. Examples of these signs appear in the key to "trail markings" in the upper right corner of the map. To make the map easier to read Rand McNally assigned numbers to these highways. The Florida Short Route was assigned the number 1, the Bee Line Highway was number 2, and so on. On the map, these numbers appear as white numerals within dark green squares. When this map was published the Florida State Highway Department had recently begun marking major highways in the state with its own system of numbers. These Florida State Roads are marked with numerals inside hollow circles on the map. A third set of numbers on the map indicate the road distances (in miles) between major highway intersections or towns.

The "Map Explanation" at the bottom of the map classifies Florida's roads by the quality of their surfaces. "Paved Roads" had hard surfaces such as asphalt or concrete. "Improved Roads" had stone or gravel surfaces that had been compacted or sprayed with oil or tar to reduce dust and prevent the formation of potholes and ruts. "Graded Roads" were gravel roads that had were periodically smoothed and leveled to keep them even or passable. "Unreported or Dirt Roads" were roads in uncertain or poor condition-the kind of roads motorists traveled at their own risk, particularly in bad weather. Note that roughly one half of the roads indicated on the map remained unpaved in the mid-1920s, when this map was published. It was possible to travel across the state from east to west on paved roads only in the central part of the state from the Tampa Bay region on the Gulf Coast to the Atlantic coast at Melbourne. Miami, still a comparatively small city, could be reached via the paved route shared by the Dixie Highway and the South Atlantic Coast Highway, but the highways leading into Pensacola, the largest city in the Florida "Panhandle," were mostly improved or graded highways.

Rand McNally was already famous for its maps at the dawn of the automobile era. The company was founded in Chicago in 1856 as the printing office of the Chicago Tribune. By the 1870s, Rand McNally was the country's leading printer of railroad tickets and the publisher of a popular national guide to railroads. It began specializing in map printing for railroads as well, and soon became the nation's leading publisher of maps and atlases. The first Rand McNally road map (of greater New York City) came along in 1904, and in 1917, the firm launched its series of Auto Trails maps. By 1922, this series covered the entire country in 21 regional districts. Around 1923, Rand McNally began making smaller "junior" editions of the Auto Trails maps especially for various automobile-related businesses, especially oil companies, who gave away these custom editions as a service to their patrons. These junior maps were also published in the early editions of the company's famous road atlas, as well as for hundreds of millions of maps given away at gas stations from the 1920s through the 1970s. Today, the Auto Trails maps are wonderful records of a time when automobile travel was new and somewhat adventurous.