Johnson's Upper and Lower Canada from 1863

There's a lot to love in these two maps of Upper and Lower Canada, parts of modern Ontario and Quebec, respectively as well as New Brunswick and bits of the United States. The maps come from Johnson's Atlas.

This map is an attractive one. It has a nice border, nice coloring (which I assume was done later and is probably not original), and that wonderful quality of spilling outside its borders. The map I have was taken from an atlas, and you can see the different page numbers and how the maps appeared. It's curious to have shown them this way, since the maps present contiguous regions, and it's not obvious why they wouldn't have been oriented differently to show one map that folds in half. This question becomes even more interesting when you consider that the two maps have only one legend, suggesting that they are meant to be viewed together.


The detail on the map is wonderful too. The counties/townships are noted in great detail, even though these sorts of geographic divisions are rarely used in any significant way in Canada these days. The seller of the map noted in the margin that this map is from 1863, which is before Canadian confederation. It is also just before Ottawa became the capital of Canada (1866) and at a time when Quebec City was the capital. Quebec is noted with a red dot on the map.

   The map shows a number of important rail lines, many canals and has three great insets, one of Montreal, one of the important Welland Canal and another of Wolf Island on the border of the United States. Wolf Island is noted as the start of the St. Lawrence river, and the inset shows a charming collection of buildings on the site of the town of Kingston, Upper Canada, a very important town at the time.

The Welland Canal, which was an important shipping route at the time that helped bypass Niagara Falls also gets its own inset, as does Montreal. Montreal's inset does not show much detail about the city, but identifies important towns on the island, shows the, now scenic, Lachine Canal, the historic Grand Trunk Railway, and has good detail about the surrounding region. At the bottom of the image of the Montreal inset, two different meridians are shown, one from Greenwich, and another from Washington.

 It's also interesting that while today Toronto is not only the largest city in Canada, but one of the top 5 in North America, on this map, it does not merit its own inset, though features which are today much less significant do draw that kind of attention from the map-makers.