What do you suppose made James Hubbard Meacham, fresh from his two county atlas publishing ventures in Ontario and Nova Scotia, come up with a proposal to publish a provincial atlas, consisting of three counties? That is what Meacham did in Prince Edward Island. Compared to his previous projects this one was huge as far as territory was concerned, with sixty-seven 20,000 acre townships, each one a microcosm of the whole in itself. Up to this moment there had been a series of maps of the Island, beginning in the 1830s, that over the years had refined and corrected the outline of the Island, begun the process of sorting out…

Sixty years ago, when I was eighteen years old, I came across a very battered huge atlas of Prince Edward Island that people called “The Old Atlas.” I was thrilled by it, not only for its double folio page spread of the map of the Island, which contained more information than I had ever seen on any other map at that time in my life. To my amazement I also discovered that it contained large scale maps of every Lot or Township in the Province. Quickly and easily – it was appropriately the first one in the atlas – I turned to Lot 1, my home lot, where I had…