Why I decorated with old maps and how you can too
A co-worker recently asked me why there are three 120-year-old maps in the backdrop of all my work video calls. I like old maps, I explained.
“But why?” he asked.
Apparently not everyone appreciates century-old maps by default. But I find them beautiful and inspiring. Colours, typography, illustrations and many pieces of paper were used to symbolize building materials, bodies of water and neighbourhoods, long before digital maps allowed us to have tooltips, multiple layers or mouse interactions.
The maps also depict my Ottawa neighbourhood more than a century ago, showing me what has changed and stayed the same. A nearby park in Mechanicsville was a lumber yard, a Canadian Pacific Railway line was near today’s light rail and the spelling of a nearby neighbourhood has dropped a letter (Hintonburg vs. Hintonburgh).
The maps are from a 65-sheet fire insurance plan created in 1902 by the Charles E. Goad Company (sometimes spelled Chas E. Goad Co.). The company was established in Montreal in 1875 and produced detailed plans of urban communities throughout Canada for fire insurance companies wanting to assess liability. During this era, fires had devastated many Canadian communities. The maps illustrated building size, purpose and material to help assess risk. When Goad died in 1910, his company had mapped more than 1,300 Canadian communities, according to the Canadian Archival Information Network.
Libraries and Archives Canada has digitized many of these maps and they can be searched for online. I found my maps by searching for my Ottawa neighbourhood and sifting through some options.
I picked the maps that had as much detail as possible about my neighbourhood and the surrounding area. The copyright has expired, but Library and Archives Canada does warn that generally use of their materials is restricted to private research or study, which I hope covers enjoying the maps as art at home. I downloaded the three pages I was interested in as PDFs and had them printed to canvas and framed for myself.
Since learning more about fire insurance maps, I often notice references to them. I recently read about the history of a nearby bar and noticed a 74-year-old map showing the bar’s beginnings as a hotel. A short walk away from that bar, on a side street, there’s a display showing the 1898 fire insurance plan of Hintonburg, also created by Goad. It has colour-coded buildings — yellow representing wood, pink for brick, blue for stone and grey for outbuildings — and beside it is a plaque commemorating The Great Ottawa-Hull Fire that occurred two years later.
