A couple of years ago, I wrote about Doug Jones’ quest to find an original copy of what he describes as the holy grail of Nelson maps: a bird’s-eye-view map of Nelson in 1897 or early 1898, created by Augustus Koch, one of the most prolific pictorial map makers of the 19th century.
The BC Archives has a foggy glass plate negative of it, but the original would have been in colour. Alas, no original copy is known to exist.
Since then, I’ve learned that Koch also produced a panoramic map of Vancouver in 1898, although no copy of it is known to survive either. They are Koch’s only recorded Canadian works.
Koch’s Nelson map wasn’t the only such work produced in this region; an artist named Pigott produced a bird’s eye view of Rossland in 1896. Another was created for Revelstoke in 1914. I haven’t seen copies of either one.
Last week, trawling the newly digitized Nelson Daily News, I discovered a second one, included as part of a three-quarter page ad taken out on Jan. 6, 1913 by realtors McQuarrie and Robertson to sell lots in Rosemont.
It’s signed “Angell Eng Co,” who also published a bird’s eye view of Vancouver. An ad for the company can be found here.
Among the labelled sites: union depot (train station), Nelson Gas Co. plant, CPR shops and yards, CPR wharf, warehouses, government building, post office, public school, hospital, street car line, city park (Gyro), high school, street car line, ferry, and in gigantic letters, Rosemont.
It’s all a little fuzzy in newsprint, and therefore hard to tell how precise the map is, but it looks pretty accurate at a glance.
If any originals exist of this one, needless to say I’d love to hear about it.
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