Rare map of early Vancouver donated
Document from 1902 fills archives gap
Larry Holman was intrigued by a recent Vancouver Sun story about the 1912 Goad’s Atlas of Vancouver. So he went to his closet and dug out his own antique map.
The Thomson Stationery Co. Plan of the City of Vancouver was published Jan. 1, 1902, a decade before the Goad’s Atlas. It’s all on one page, as opposed to 50 in Goad’s first volume.
It’s a fascinating document, showing the city on the cusp of the boom in which the population exploded from 27,000 people in 1901 to 100,000 in 1911.
Much of Kitsilano south of Broadway hadn’t been divided into lots. Today’s Vanier Park is labelled “Indian Reserve.” The area east of Nanaimo Street isn’t Vancouver, it’s the “Town of Hastings.”
Holman, 73, inherited the map from his father, who received it as a gift from a cousin.
“My cousin was the captain of a dredge, I think it was Vancouver Barge and Dredge,” said Holman.
“I’ve had it sitting in the closet for 15-plus years.”
Thomson Stationery was one of Vancouver’s pioneer businesses, popping up in the city’s first directory in 1887 as Thomson Bros. Booksellers, Stationers & Printers. The Vancouver Archives has scanned Thomson maps from 1898, 1907 and 1910 and put them up online. They also have two copies of the 1902 map, but neither has been scanned.
“One of them is incomplete, and one is in really, really bad condition,” said Sharon Walz of the archives.
“So bad we could never even scan it, because the pieces would start falling off.”
This week Holman and wife Ann took their map into the archives and donated it. Their copy may be the best to survive — the Thomson maps were working documents that were often written on, folded up and generally abused.