Halifax Map 1878 City Plan - Halifax, Dartmouth, Bedford

A.D. and W.B. Roe, trading as Roe Brothers of Saint John, drew and published this plan of Halifax for their 1878 Atlas of the Maritime Provinces of the Dominion of Canada, drafted on a rectangular polyconic projection and engraved in Philadelphia by Worley & Bracher. The brothers built their atlas from British Admiralty charts, National Boundary Survey data and their own new surveys, a combination that shows in a Halifax plan precise enough to record soundings in fathoms alongside the city's wards, wharves and public buildings. Hand colouring was added after printing to separate the city's administrative wards at a glance, a common finishing touch on Philadelphia-engraved plans of this period. The plan captures Halifax as both a working port and a Royal Navy garrison town, its economy and its street plan alike shaped by more than a century as the British military's principal North American anchorage.

Halifax itself fills most of the sheet, its wharves, churches, schools and government buildings identified through a numbered reference table rather than crowded text on the map face. Dartmouth appears across the harbour to the east, already a separate town in its own right by 1878 and connected to Halifax only by ferry rather than bridge. Radial distances from the city centre are marked outward across the peninsula, a practical touch aimed at residents and visitors trying to judge how far outlying streets sat from the harbourfront core. Soundings threaded through the harbour itself underline how much of Halifax's importance in 1878 still rested on ships finding safe water, not on the streets alone.

A Halifax city plan like this one is a natural gift for anyone who grew up on the peninsula, has family who served at the garrison, or is settling in Dartmouth and wants the older shoreline on the wall. It stands apart from the province-wide Nova Scotia county atlas the store also carries from the same 1881 Belden series, which maps the whole of western Nova Scotia at a much smaller scale and shows Halifax only as one town among many rather than as this sheet's entire subject. It's offered unframed, available across a full range of sizes from a compact print to a large-format piece suited to an entryway or study.