Montreal Map 1898 City Plan - Montreal, Hochelaga, Maisonneuve

William Henry Rand and Andrew McNally's Chicago firm mapped the city of Montreal for their Indexed Atlas of the World, this particular printing dated 1898, following the two-volume 1897 edition the company itself regarded as the high-water mark of its nineteenth-century atlas production. As with the firm's separate 1897 Montreal sheet, this city plan earned its own dedicated page within the atlas rather than being folded into the broader Quebec provincial map, a recognition of Montreal's standing as the largest and commercially most important city in the Dominion. Extremely detailed even by the standards of Rand McNally's other city plans, it records street layouts, distinct regions and parks alongside working infrastructure including rail lines, stockyards, bridges and piers, a level of industrial detail that goes well beyond simple street navigation. It captures Montreal near the very end of the nineteenth century, its port and rail infrastructure by then firmly established as the busiest and most extensive in Canada.

Mount Royal anchors the plan near its centre, the parkland hill around which the city's most fashionable districts had grown up by the 1890s. Hochelaga, the historic name recorded by early French explorers for an Indigenous settlement on the island, appears as an established eastern district of the modern city, its ancient name persisting even as Montreal grew around it. Maisonneuve, further east again, is marked as a rapidly developing industrial municipality in its own right, distinct from Montreal proper at the time of this printing. Stockyards, rail lines, bridges and piers thread through the plan's industrial districts, evidence of a working port city whose economy this map takes as seriously as its street grid.

This detailed city plan suits a Montreal family with roots in the city's eastern industrial districts specifically, or a collector who wants the most infrastructure-dense of the store's several Montreal plans. The store also carries Montreal mapped by the same firm just a year earlier in 1897, by London Magazine as a regional survey back in 1761, and for a religious convention's delegates in 1893; this 1898 Rand McNally edition is distinguished by its unusually heavy emphasis on rail lines, stockyards and piers, mapping Montreal's industrial economy in more detail than any of the collection's other city plans. It's offered unframed and available across a full range of sizes, from a compact print to a large-format wall piece.