Montreal Map 1897 City Plan - Montreal, Westmount, Verdun

Rand McNally & Co. of Chicago mapped the city of Montreal for their 1897 Indexed Atlas of the World, a two-volume reference the firm regarded as the high-water mark of its nineteenth-century atlas production, printed and published from offices in Chicago and New York. Where most of the atlas's Canadian coverage worked at a provincial scale, Montreal earned its own dedicated city plan, a reflection of its standing as the largest and most commercially important city in the Dominion. The sheet is oriented with north toward the right rather than the top, a layout choice that let the engraver fit Montreal's full street grid and harbourfront onto the page without cramping either. Its full printed colour marks major buildings, parks and cemeteries individually, a level of civic detail that a provincial-scale map has no room to include, recording the city at a moment when its port had already made it the busiest inland harbour in North America.

Mount Royal, the wooded hill for which the city is named, is marked near the plan's centre, its slopes already being developed as parkland by 1897. Westmount, on the mountain's western flank, appears as an independent municipality distinct from Montreal proper, already established as a separate, affluent enclave. Verdun, downriver along the St. Lawrence, is shown as a riverside municipality with its own developing waterfront, similarly independent of the city it bordered. Major buildings, parks and cemeteries are individually marked across the plan, evidence of a city dense enough by 1897 that a simple street grid alone could no longer capture its full civic landscape.

This street-level plan suits a Montreal family with roots in any of these historic districts, or a collector who prefers a genuine street-level city plan over a broader provincial map. The store also carries Montreal mapped in three other eras entirely, in 1761 by London Magazine as a regional survey, in 1893 for a religious convention's delegates, and again in 1898 in a still more detailed Rand McNally edition; this 1897 sheet is notable for its unusual north-to-the-right orientation and its individual marking of the independent municipalities already ringing the city by the century's end. It's offered unframed and available across a full range of sizes, from a compact print to a large-format wall piece.