Reg Porter's Heritage Blog

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…

Colonists fight British Feudalism. For a hundred years the settlers on the British Colony of Saint John’s Island/Prince Edward Island lived on the land in a manner that was unknown anywhere else in North America. When Samuel Holland produced his great map in 1765, the townships he created with a regularity that homogenised the topography of the landscape, belonged entirely to another country and another time. It was almost impossible for a settler to own his own property because the colony was set up in such a way that a perpetual landlord/tenant relationship was established for all time. This led to terrible and grotesque hardships for those who, at their…

What does the Lake Map look like? My first intimate encounter with the Lake map – now named after the chief suyveyor –  occurred in August 1994 when I was asked to prepare an evaluation and proposal concerning the restoration of this map in a local collection. I had the opportunity to spend some time  examining and studying it, and gaining a first hand experience of what the map was originally supposed to look like. The Lake Map is a huge lithograph meant to be hung on a wall, and is printed on heavy paper and mounted on two wooden rollers, the top one a plain moulding about 77 inches…

There have been many accounts of the Prince of Wales’s visit to North America in 1860 which caused a frenzy of excitement in the British Colonies and the United States. Most of them are easily available on the internet and I have provided links to some of them in the Resources section. The most complete narrative of the visit I know of is in Pollard’s 1898 book. Fortunately, thoughtful UPEI has scanned this rarity and the relevant chapter is available in the link below. Recently Harry Holman has posted two very interesting essays on aspects of the visit on his Sailstrait blog which I highly recommend. Links to these are…