Hopkins’ City Atlas of Halifax, 1878

In order to better display these beautiful cartography arts, I georeferenced all 22 maps in the alta and clipped the frame and blank areas. Now please enjoy the seamless map of 1878 Halifax.

Henry W. Hopkins (1838-1920) was an American land surveyor and civil engineer active in the eastern United States and Canada in the last half of the 19th century. His specialty was large, folio-sized real-estate or land-ownership atlases produced and sold for prominent cities and counties of the time. The atlases were outstanding examples then of cadastral surveying; today, as visual records of a fixed and knowable past, they hold interest and appeal for both scholarly researchers and armchair explorers.

Hopkins was born in Haddonfield, New Jersey in 1838. By 1865 he and his brother G.M. (Griffith Morgan) Hopkins had established a map-production business in Philadelphia. The firm was active in Pennsylvania first, producing atlases for Delaware (1870) and Germantown (1871). By the late 1870s and for unknown reasons, their focus of interest moved north into Canada. Henry Hopkins visited Halifax in October 1877 and corresponded with James R. Graham, Chairman of the City Board of Works (Halifax Regional Municipality Archives, Correspondence, Clerk of Works, folder 16); the following year the firm produced both the City Atlas of Halifax and the Map of the Town of Dartmouth. Later productions included atlases for Montreal (1879), Quebec City (1879) and Sherbrooke (1881).

Plat maps are real-estate or land-ownership maps showing not only the names of property owners, but also individual lots, block numbers, dimensions, street widths, and prominent buildings or physical landmarks such as churches, cemeteries, schools, wharves, railroads, lakes, rivers and streams. The maps also provide an outline or 'footprint' for each structure on a lot, and a colour code for building construction (e.g. yellow = frame building; pink = brick or stone building).