Sacramento — Bird’s-Eye View Published by the Daily Record-Union and Weekly Union

Cartographer: Drawn and lithographed by W. W. Elliott & Co., San Francisco; issued for the Daily Record-Union newspaper, 1890

Year: 1895

This sweeping panorama looks southeast across the Sacramento River, capturing the capital’s gridded streets, wharf-front steamboats, and rail yards only a generation after the transcontinental line arrived. A frame of 28 inset vignettes features the State Capitol, hotels, theaters, schools, and stately residences, doubling as a business directory. The central view shows the Central Pacific machine-shop complex and river bridges in the foreground, tree-lined avenues marching toward farmland in the distance, and the partially built State Capitol dome rising above downtown. Extensive levees, orchards, and irrigation canals reveal post-flood reclamation and agricultural expansion. Numbered keys and booster text along the bottom promote Sacramento’s climate, transportation links, and growing industries, making the lithograph both a civic portrait and a late-19th-century marketing piece for California’s river metropolis.