California: The Golden State

One of 24 different state pictorials designed to promote the products of the Mentholatum Company.

This interesting combination of historical poster, pictorial map, and advertising piece was copyrighted in 1938 by R.T. Aitchinson and published by the Mentholatum Company of Wilmington, Delaware. A brightly colored image uses four shades to approximate the physical landscape of the Golden State, with its lush valleys and barren deserts. Small vignettes highlight local industries, historic sites, and recreational opportunities. Accompanying “educational” text provides a chronology of California’s rich, apparently exclusively European, history. According to Dr. Stephen Hornsby,

“The historical impulse was so great in the thirties that the Mentholatum Company, taking the opportunity to market products such as Mentholatum Lip Care to school children, hired historian and printer Robert T. Aitchinson to design pictorial maps showing the history of individual states. Between 1936 and 1941, Aitchinson produced twenty-four maps illustrating twenty-seven states.”

Source: Picturing America: The Golden Age of Pictorial Maps by Stephen Hornsby