Ottawa Map 1885 City Plan - Ottawa, New Edinburgh, Bytown

A.S. Woodburn, publisher of the Ottawa Free Press and one of the city's leading printers by the mid-1880s, published this large-format plan of Ottawa in 1885, printed in Montreal by George Bishop & Company. Examined and approved by the civil engineer Robert Surtees, who designed several of Ottawa's earliest surviving buildings including the Wallis House and the Carleton County Courthouse, the plan carries an unusual degree of professional oversight for a commercially published city map. Coloured by ward and locating public buildings, streets, parks, squares, hotels, bridges, railroad lines, early property owners, canals and wharves, it stands as one of the earliest obtainable large-format maps of Canada's capital, with only two other known examples held by Canadian archives. It records Ottawa less than fifty years after its founding as a rough timber town, by 1885 transformed into the seat of a national government still visibly new to the role Queen Victoria had assigned it.

Ottawa itself, still popularly recalling its earlier name of Bytown, fills the plan's centre, its Uppertown and Lowertown districts, divided by the Rideau Canal, both traced from Colonel John By's original 1826 townsite. New Edinburgh, across the Rideau River, is marked explicitly as a separate village, one of the settlements the plan takes care to distinguish from the city proper even as Ottawa's growth pressed against its borders. The Rideau Canal itself, completed in 1832 to link Montreal and Kingston while bypassing the stretch of the St. Lawrence bordering New York State, threads through the plan as the infrastructure around which the entire city had originally been built. Wharves and timber-trade infrastructure along the Ottawa River round out a plan that still shows a capital shaped as much by lumber and canal traffic as by government business.

This detailed plan suits an Ottawa family researching roots in Bytown, Uppertown or New Edinburgh specifically, or a collector drawn to its rare, professionally surveyed status and documented scarcity. The store also carries Toronto and Montreal mapped in comparably detailed ward-coloured city plans from the 1870s and 1890s; this 1885 Ottawa sheet stands apart as the only one in the collection tied to a named, credentialed civil engineer's formal approval, and as one of the earliest large-format plans of the national capital to survive in any quantity. It's offered unframed and available across a full range of sizes, from a compact print to a large-format wall piece.