Ontario Map 1836 County Print - Toronto, Kingston, London

Henry S. Tanner published this map of Upper Canada, the historic name for what is now Ontario, in the 1836 edition of A New Universal Atlas, issued from his own Philadelphia offices and engraved under the title-page imprint of J. Knight. Tanner produced this atlas specifically to reach a broader, less expensive market than his earlier large-format American Atlas, shrinking the page size while expanding coverage of territory beyond the United States, and the volume had first appeared in parts starting in 1834 before being gathered into this complete edition. Its full colour by county and careful rendering of topography, including waterfalls and rapids along the province's rivers, reflect Tanner's reputation as one of the most technically accomplished American map publishers of the 1830s. The sheet records Upper Canada barely three years before the rebellions of 1837 would shake the colony's government, its settled counties clustered tightly along the Great Lakes shoreline while the interior remained sparsely mapped.

Toronto, still adjusting to its 1834 renaming from York, anchors the sheet's southern shore on Lake Ontario as the colony's capital. Kingston, further east, appears as a fortified town at the point where Lake Ontario narrows into the St. Lawrence, its strategic position long recognized by British military planners. London, inland in the southwestern peninsula between Lakes Erie and Huron, is marked as a smaller but growing settlement in a fertile agricultural district. Waterfalls and rapids are traced along the province's rivers throughout, a level of topographic detail Tanner's atlas applied consistently across its American and Canadian coverage alike.

This early county sheet suits an Ontario family researching roots from the colonial Upper Canada period, or a collector interested in Tanner's technically precise Philadelphia engraving house specifically. The store also carries this same title and publisher in a later 1842 edition, Tanner's final printing before his atlas passed out of production, revised with new maps and updated place names; this 1836 sheet is the earlier of the two Tanner editions, capturing Upper Canada before the political upheaval of 1837 rather than in the changed colony that followed it. It's offered unframed and available across a full range of sizes, from a compact print to a large-format wall piece.