New Relief Map of the Bay Counties. Published by The Whitaker and Ray Co.

This large and visually striking wall map presents the San Francisco Bay Counties — Marin, Sonoma, Napa, Solano, Contra Costa, Alameda, Santa Clara, Santa Cruz, San Mateo, and the city and county of San Francisco itself — in the pictorial shaded relief style that made this format one of the most distinctive cartographic products of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Published by the Whitaker and Ray Company of San Francisco in 1905 and mounted on its original wooden rollers, it was designed to be seen at a distance as much as read at close range: the peninsula rendered in warm pink, the surrounding hills modeled in green and rose as though seen from the air, the Bay a luminous white at the composition’s center. It is a map of a specific Bay Area — prosperous, interconnected by rail, rapidly urbanizing, at the height of its pre-earthquake confidence — published twelve months before the morning of April 18, 1906.

The Map in Detail

San Francisco occupies the left center of the composition, its street grid rendered in pink against the surrounding hills and waterfront, with Golden Gate Park clearly delineated to the west. The Golden Gate opens to the Pacific at the upper left, with Marin County — San Rafael, Sausalito, Point Bonita — facing across the water. San Pablo Bay and Suisun Bay extend northeast, with Vallejo, Benicia, and Martinez marked along their shores, and the Sacramento River visible at the upper right corner leading to Sacramento County. Contra Costa County rises behind Oakland and Berkeley in painterly green and rose relief, with Mount Diablo — 3,849 feet, the great landmark visible from across the Bay — anchoring the eastern edge. The Alameda flatlands and the San Ramon Valley stretch south. San Jose and Santa Clara appear at the lower right, with the Lick Observatory marked on Mount Hamilton above them. The railroad lines threading through the landscape — the Southern Pacific connections north, south, and east — record the infrastructural reality that the map’s commercial users would have needed at a glance. A statistical panel at the base lists distances, areas, and elevations: Golden Gate Park from City Hall (2 miles), San Francisco from Bay to Ocean (7 miles), Goat Island from San Francisco (1½ miles), and the heights of Twin Peaks, Mount Tamalpais, Mount Diablo, and Telegraph Hill. The map is preserved on its original wooden rollers with turned brass finials, a survival that is increasingly rare.

Historical Context

San Francisco in 1905 was the dominant city of the American West — its port the fulcrum of Pacific trade, its financial institutions underwriting California agriculture and Nevada mining, its population approaching 400,000. Oakland and Berkeley were growing rapidly as rail connections made the East Bay accessible; the ferry system crossing the Bay carried more passengers per day than almost any transit operation in the country. The communities shown on this map — Alameda, Hayward, San Mateo, Redwood City, and San Jose — were being drawn into an emerging regional economy of considerable confidence and momentum. The relief rendering is itself an artifact of this moment: the pictorial hill-shading technique, developed and refined by American lithographers in the 1880s and 1890s, was designed to communicate topography at a glance to viewers in offices, schoolrooms, and railroad stations across the region. On April 18, 1906 — one year after this map was published — an earthquake estimated at magnitude 7.9 struck at 5:12 in the morning. The fires that followed burned for three days. Approximately twenty-eight thousand buildings were destroyed and three thousand people killed. The city shown on this map — its grid intact, its waterfront active, its parks and hills undisturbed — is the city that existed before that morning.

Publication History and Census

The Whitaker and Ray Company was a San Francisco publisher active in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, known for educational and commercial publications serving the California market. The New Relief Map of the Bay Counties was issued as a wall map, designed for display rather than filing, which accounts for the relative scarcity of well-preserved copies today. Mounted on original wooden rollers with turned brass finials. 1905.