This article was published in the Fall 2024 issue of the Ontario Genealogical Society journal Families.
The Tremaine counties maps are ubiquitous to researchers of the genealogy or history of pre-Confederation Canada West. The 13 County Maps [1] published by Tremaine’s Map Establishment (as it came to be called) between 1856 and 1864 provide a wonderful connecting link between the early Township survey, settlement and military maps and the 1870’s series of Ontario County Atlases.[2] Many archive, museum and library collections in Ontario have copies of the Tremaine maps and there are a number of digital scans available online. Not as much has been written recently about who the Tremaines were and what their business model was.[3] The details of the Tremaine family history and their successful publishing enterprise are the topics to be addressed below.
The Tremaine Family
The various maps published by the Tremaine family often make reference to Geo. C. Tremaine, Geo. R. Tremaine and G.M. Tremaine in various combinations. The leader of this enterprise was George Collins Tremaine (1805-1882) who was born in Rodman, Jefferson County, New York, son of Reuben Tremaine (1779-1867) and Laura Gridley (1781-1857). Reuben Tremaine, born in Connecticut, was an early settler and farmer in Rodman. He was a founder, Deacon and ordained minister in the Rodman Congregational Church. The family had been in America for several generations, originating in England.[4] Reuben and Laura had eight children, but George Collins Tremaine and his two siblings Gaius Gridley Tremaine (1809-1868) and Mary (Tremaine) Ward (1816-1909) are of particular relevance to this narrative.
George Collins Tremaine did not marry and had no children, but formed a close business relationship with two of his brother Gaius Gridley Tremaine’s New York born and raised sons, George Richard Tremaine (1836-1898) and Gaius Monroe Tremaine (1839-1907), as well as his sister Mary’s husband John Ferris Ward (1819-1900).[5] George Collins Tremaine came to Canada some time before 1851 when he was enumerated in Norwich, Oxford County, Canada West as a 47 years old book peddler.[6] There is also some evidence that he taught school in Cataraqui Village (now part of Kingston) before 1844.[7]
The Tremaine Map Establishment
George C. Tremaine and / or his nephews published or printed at least 22 maps in Canada between 1856 and 1872 and there were possibly several others – see Exhibit 1. Some were published under the name of Geo. C. Tremaine, some under Geo. R. and G.M. Tremaine and others as the Tremaine Map Establishment. The early 1856 map of Norfolk County (the first county map published in Canada West) and 1857 map of Oxford County list Kingston as the address for the business. The address for the 1858 Brant County map was Oakville and most subsequent maps listed addresses in the St. Lawrence Ward area of Toronto.
Double click on the exhibit below for a higher resolution image.
Exhibit 1 – Tremaine Maps – 1856-1864 [8]
Other later Tremaine maps and products included:
1864 – A newspaper article [9] solicited agents to help sell a set of 200 lithographs of mechanical processes which had been printed by Tremaine and marketed for $1.00.
1865 – Map of the British Provinces, Canada, New Brunswick and Nova Scotia, Prince Edward Island and the Adjacent US States; published by Geo. C. Tremaine; compiled and drawn by G.W. and G.B. Colton
1866 – Map of Europe and North America with the routes of the Canada Ocean Steam Ships and the shortest sailing distances from the Provincial ports to the British Islands; published by Geo. C. Tremaine
1872 – Tremaine’s Wall Atlas embracing the British Isles, the Dominion of Canada, with the adjacent province & border states and the Great Northwest, the West Indies, British India, the East Indies, New Zealand, Australia and the World; published by Geo. C. Tremaine
In 1861 Geo. C. and Geo. R. Tremaine were enumerated at the ill-named Roach’s Hotel in Toronto. Exhibit 2 illustrates how to identify exactly where they were living by cross referencing an 1861 census entry [10] with the 1856 Brown’s Toronto General Directory [11] and the Toronto inset on Tremaine’s 1860 map of the County of York.[12] The various Tremaine Toronto business addresses listed on Exhibit 1 were also near this hotel. This map illustrates nicely how what is now The Esplanade was the Toronto Harbour waterfront in 1860.
Exhibit 2 – Location of the Tremaines’ Toronto Hotel Residence in 1861
The Marketing of the Maps
The County maps published by the Tremaine Map Establishment were marketed using a simple business model. Advertisements would be placed in local newspapers then agents for the publisher would canvas the County soliciting subscriptions for the maps. The following August 1859 advertisement [13] related to the County of York map published in 1860 was typical.
Prospectus of a Valuable Local Map and Directory
The Subscriber purposes to publish, on a large scale, a Descriptive Map of the wealthy and populous County of York, exhibiting the Harbours, Rivers, Railways, the projected Georgian Ship Canal, Mill Streams, Mills, Manufacturers, Queen’s Highways, Macadamised, Plank and Gravel Roads, the City, Towns, Villages, Post-offices; the location of the Township Halls, Country Churches and Schools; Township Boundaries, Concessions, Side-lines, Farm and Wild Lots, with generally Owners names.
The names of subscribers, Resident Proprietors of Farms, will be neatly engraved in lower case Roman letters on their properties and the location of their residences shown.
The names of subscribers in the City, Town and Villages will be published also, if furnished the canvasser, the title profession, trade, &c. of each, thus constituting not only a most useful and beautiful map, but a very complete Rural, Professional and Business Directory combined.
Should this important and expensive undertaking meet with good encouragement the map, drawn to a scale of sixty chains to an inch, with a plan of Toronto on a much larger scale, will be published in the best style of local map making.
As soon as convenient, after an improvement in the times shall warrant bringing it out, it will be furnished to subscribers on canvass, handsomely colored, varnished and mounted.
GEO. TREMAINE
Toronto 1859
For an extra payment a Vignette consisting of an image of the residence or business of the subscriber could be added to the border of the map. The Town of Ingersoll paid £8 15s ($42.58) [14] in 1857 for the image below of the Market House and Town Hall on the County of Oxford map.[15]
Exhibit 3 – Ingersoll Market House and Town Hall Vignette
In 1858 the Township of Brantford paid £30 ($146) for 24 copies of the County of Brant map for use in its schools.[16] Subsequent transactions for the Tremaines were denominated in Canadian dollars as prescribed by an 1857 Act of the Province of Canada. The maps normally sold to individual retail subscribers for $5 or $6.
A book titled How ’tis Done published in Chicago in 1879 [17] has made a compelling case that the door-to-door sales practices of some of the county map peddlers active in mid-19th century North America were not always as scrupulous as might be hoped. The book describes in detail the sales techniques many of the map canvassers used to target both rural and urban potential subscribers. It asserts that many subscribers suffered buyers’ remorse after receiving their expensive and unwieldy large format wall maps. It was this discomfort which was one of the motivations which led map makers to pivot to more manageable county map atlases in the 1870s, again sold using similar door-to-door techniques. How ’tis Done also explains the potentially profitable nature of the enterprise by breaking down the costs and revenues involved. The success of any one map was directly related to the number of copies sold given that upfront fixed costs needed to be recouped first. The fact that the Tremaines were motivated to publish so many maps suggests that the business was likely profitable for them, at least for a while.
Mid Nineteenth Century Map-making Techniques
As noted on Exhibit 1 above, the creation of a map involved a number of different specialists, all coordinated by the publisher. First were the surveyors who would compile and draw initial maps. The county map makers usually used existing surveys and would then cross reference them with tax assessment data. Then came the engravers or lithographers whose job was to create plates to be inked for the printing process. In the case of the vignettes of buildings and landmarks which were included on the border of the maps, an ambrotype photograph was sometimes used as the source image for the engraver or lithographer. During the 19th century there were great advances being made in print making techniques. There were a number of different established and experimental processes in use based on the two different approaches of engraving on copper plate or stone lithography. The first was time consuming and required a very high degree of skill as the image had to be engraved in mirror image on the plate. Stone lithography methods evolved at this time to allow an image to be drawn on a transfer paper which was then applied to a limestone after which processes would be used to set and protect the image. Most agreed that copper plate engraving produced a slightly better product but stone lithography was a much cheaper and quicker method. Debate over the relative quality of maps produced by these two processes were at the heart of a dispute which erupted in the early 1860s between the Tremaines and the Tackabury Brothers over maps of Canada West which they were each proposing to publish. More on this in the next issue. The Tremaine Map Establishment used stone lithography for their county maps. The early maps were printed in New York City and later maps were printed in Toronto.
The paper to be used for the maps was also an important variable. These were large wall maps (up to 6.5 feet/200 cm wide and up to 4.8 feet/147 cm tall though some were a little smaller). The paper would typically consist of four quarter sheets attached to a linen backing, varnished for protection and attached to hangers (dowels) top and bottom so that they could be rolled up. Water colours were often applied to delineate township borders.
George Collins Tremaine Remains in Canada
The last map bearing George C. Tremaine’s name was the 1872 British Empire map noted earlier which was published when he was 66. In 1881 George C. Tremaine was enumerated in Napanee, Ontario with the family of his nephew and namesake Dr. George Collins Tremaine Ward (1855-1912).[18] George died in Picton, Ontario on 6 April 1882 at the age of 76 and is buried in the Cataraqui Cemetery in Kingston.[19]
Gaius Monroe “G.M.” Tremaine, the Insurance Agent
It is easy to understand why Gaius Monroe Tremaine went through life styling himself as “G.M.” Tremaine rather than using his full given names. The final reference I have found for him in connection with the Canadian map business was on the Lincoln & Welland and Middlesex maps of 1862. He settled in the Village of Fredonia, Town of Pomfret, Chautauqua County, New York near the southern shore of Lake Erie in 1865 and established a successful insurance agency – G.M. Tremaine & Son. He and his wife Eunice had three children and he was described in his 1907 obituary as one of the prominent citizens of his community.[20] “He was a life-long thinker, well informed on general topics, and quite an interesting speaker and talker. He had travelled much before settling in Fredonia.”
George Richard Tremaine Becomes a Showman
George R. Tremaine’s name also disappeared from the Canada West records after the publication of the 1864 Map of the County of Elgin, the last of their completed county maps.[21] George was a photography pioneer who was credited with taking ambrotype images used as the source material for the Vignettes which bordered at least two of the County maps (Norfolk, 1856 and Oxford, 1857). In about 1864 (when he was 28) he returned to the USA and embarked on a career providing illustrated lectures using a new photographic projection technique. He gave a well-received presentation of his technique to the Photographic Society at the Brooklyn Athenaeum and Reading Room in November of 1864.[22] He described his presentation initially as a Heliographorama but in later years settled on the simpler “Sun Painting” or “Sun Picture” entertainment description. His projection technique involved a type of magic lantern which he used to project 16 feet square images onto a canvas screen using a calcium oxide light source (i.e. limelight). His photo source was a two inches square glass slide. It was reported in 1864 that he had over 500 images documenting a trip from New York to London and then through Europe to Egypt and the Holy Land. No evidence of the dates of this travel have yet been located.
The modus operandi for his Sun Picture Entertainments involved visiting a town and then presenting a series of six heavily promoted lectures in the local opera or concert hall. From 1864 until 1898 he traveled throughout the USA presenting his illustrated travelogue, often promoting himself as Professor Tremaine. Newspaper advertisements and complimentary commentaries about his “entertainments” survive for dozens of cities and states throughout this period. Below is a sample of a typical programme from 1893.[23]
Exhibit 4 – George R. Tremaine 1893 Lecture Programme
George Richard Tremaine died of a heart attack on 16 August 1898 in Brainerd, Minnesota, just hours after completing a lecture.[24] His wife Jane was travelling with him and was at his side when he died. He was described as a “showman” on his death registration. Jane (McCarly/McCarty) [25] and George R. Tremaine had at least six children, the first three born in Toronto and the remainder in the USA. Only three were still living in 1910. Jane was an Irish immigrant Roman Catholic which may have caused some ripples in George’s staunch Congregationalist family. They had lived near the home of George’s brother G.M. Tremaine in Fredonia throughout much of their married life, but Jane moved to the homes of two of her sons in Bradford, Pennsylvania after George’s death.[26]
A Lasting Legacy
It is impossible to know whether the Tremaine family fully appreciated the lasting legacy they were leaving for future Ontarians with their county maps. The 1856 to 1864 maps provide an invaluable resource for the settlement history of Ontario. Images of historical sites; the survey grid; lists of commercial enterprises (many placed on the maps); locations of farms and names of the owners; roads and waterways, jurisdictional borders and all of the other rich data provides a graphic early snapshot of pre-Confederation Canada West.
The Tremaine family got their start as book salesmen (peddlers) but evolved into an integrated map establishment handling most parts of the production process. When the nephews George R. and G.M. Tremaine left Canada by 1864 they carried on to new careers which also involved a fair degree of salesmanship.
Unfortunately, the production process for the maps had a few inherent flaws which have resulted in very few of these maps surviving in good condition. In most cases the varnish applied to the paper has dried out and cracked over time and the continuous rolling and unrolling of these large format maps on their hangers has created wear. There are however reasonably complete examples of each of the county maps which have been digitized. There have been several papers written about the conservation of these old maps which help us understand the challenges.[27]
The Ontario Historical County Maps project is an ambitious collaboration among Marcel Fortin, University of Toronto; Cheryl Woods, Western University; and Lorraine Dubreuil, McGill University (Emerita) and others. They have geo-referenced and indexed the Tremaine County maps and many others and incorporated them into an online digital resource. It is still a work in progress but shows great promise. The weblink is https://utoronto.maps.arcgis.com/apps/webappviewer/index.html?id=8cc6be34f6b54992b27da17467492d2f .
In the next issue of Families Graham will introduce the Tackabury Brothers, another map making family from Upper New York State active in 1860s Canada. Their feud with Tremaine’s Map Establishment over competing 1862 Canada West wall maps, which played out very publicly in the press of the time, will be explained. Graham will also be delivering a Zoom presentation for OGS Niagara Peninsula Branch on the evening of 21 February 2025 discussing Tremaine’s Map Establishment, with particular focus on the 1862 Counties of Lincoln and Welland map (watch the eWeekly Update for details).
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[1] The 13 maps published by Tremaine cover 14 discrete historical counties. Lincoln and Welland, which had been split in 1846, were combined in one map – see Exhibit 1; The Tremaine Map Establishment was also the lithographer for a Haldimand County map, published by W. Jones in 1863. During this same period maps of most of the eastern counties of Canada West were published by D.P. Putnam, either alone or in association with others.
[2] See The Canadian County Atlas Digital Project sponsored by McGill University – https://digital.library.mcgill.ca/countyatlas/primarysource.htm and https://digital.library.mcgill.ca/countyatlas/searchmapframes.php ; Most of these atlases were published by H.R. Page & Co. or H. Belden & Co.
[3] There were two books written about 50 years ago which touched on the Tremaine map business. These books did a wonderful job of focusing on the maps themselves, but unfortunately the genealogical details in both were either absent or in error in several important areas. The first was Betty H. Kidd, Using Maps in Tracing Your Family History (Ottawa: Ontario Genealogical Society, Ottawa Branch, Publication 74-14, 1975). Ms. Kidd was Chief, National Map Collection at the Public Archives of Canada (now LAC). She also summarized some of the content of her book in an OGS Families article titled Maps in Genealogical Research (Vol. 16, No. 4 1977 p152). The second was Joan Winearls, “Nineteenth Century County Land Ownership Maps in Canada: An Introductory Essay”in County Maps: Land Ownership Maps in Canada in the 19th Century, compiled by Heather Maddick (Ottawa: National Map Collection, Public Archives of Canada, 1976)
[4] The history of the earlier generations of the Tremaine family is beyond the scope of this paper however, Ebenezer Mack Treman and Murray E. Poole, The History of the Treman, Tremaine, Truman Family in America (Ithaca, NY: Press of the Ithaca Democrat, 1901) provides 2,500 pages of detail. Similar to many such family histories this book relied heavily on oral reports and as such some of the information should be viewed with care. It has been one of the initial sources for the Tremaine family genealogical details, cross referenced to primary records where possible – https://www.seekingmyroots.com/members/files/G006527.pdf
[5] John Ferris Ward was born in Canada and worked as an agent and assistant map maker for Tremaine’s Map Establishment (per 1861 Tremaine County of Durham map and contemporary newspaper articles).
[6] 1851 Census of Canada West, Oxford County, Township of Norwich, p120, line 12, ancestry.ca
[7] Late Mrs. Ward Lived in Cataraqui, The Kingston Whig Standard, 11 November 1907: 2, newspapers.com. This obituary for Mary (Tremaine) Ward states that she came to Canada from Rodman, New York to work as an assistant teacher in her brother’s school. Mary met her husband in Cataraqui and they married before 1844. Cataraqui Village was on the northwest edge of Kingston.
[8] A wide range of Internet and Library queries were employed to compile this table. Of particular value was Joan Winearls, Mapping Upper Canada 1780-1867: An Annotated Bibliography of Manuscript and Printed Maps (Toronto, Ontario: University of Toronto Press, 1991) and Heather Maddick, compiler, County Maps: Land Ownership Maps in Canada in the 19th Century (Ottawa: National Map Collection, Public Archives of Canada, 1976)
[9] Now Ready, Nearly 200 Mechanical Motions, Owen Sound Comet, 3 June 1864: 4, newspapers.com
[10] 1861 Census of Canada West, York, St. Lawrence Ward, District 2, page 84, lines 17 & 18, ancestry.ca (Tremaine entries not indexed, search on John Roach, Innkeeper to find this page)
[11] Brown’s Toronto General Directory, 1856: 56 – https://archive.org/details/mightsgreatertor00unse/page/56/mode/2up?q=Roach%27s
[12] This crop is from the digital copy of the County of York map on the Toronto Library website – https://maps.library.utoronto.ca/datapub/digital/NG/historicTOmaps/trem0001.jpg . There is also an excellent digital copy of the full map on the York University website – https://digital.library.yorku.ca/maps-1899-and-earlier/tremaines-map-county-york-canada-west
[13] Prospectus of a Valuable Local Map and Directory, York Herald, 5 August 1859: 4, newspapers.com
[14] The Canadian pound was worth 4.8667 dollars in 1857
[15] Crop from the South East quadrant of the 1857 County of Oxford map digitized by Oxford County Library – https://history.ocl.net/oxford-land/1857-tremaines-map-of-oxford-county/
[16] In Account with the Municipality of the Township of Brantford 1858, The Brantford Weekly Expositor, 1 April 1859: 3, newspapers.com; Using the formula in a previous endnote this amount would be $146
[17] Harrington, Bates (author per Library of Congress entry though no author is actually listed in the book), How ’tis Done: A Thorough Ventilation of the Numerous Schemes Conducted by Wandering Canvassers, Together with the Various Advertising Dodges for the Swindling of the Public (Chicago: Fidelity Publishing Company, 1879) – https://archive.org/details/howtisdonethorou00harr/mode/2up
[18] 1881 Census of Canada, Province of Ontario, District No. 117 – Lennox, Sub district – East Town of Napanee, p42, line 28, ancestry.ca
[19] County of Prince Edward Schedule C: Deaths, p384, No. 20, ancestry.ca; Brought to Kingston, The Kingston Whig-Standard, 14 April 1882: 3, newspapers.com
[20] Hon. Gaius M. Tremaine Dead, Buffalo Evening News, 11 Feb 1907: 16, newspapers.com
[21] The best documented and commemorated Tremaine county map is this final one for Elgin County. In 2002 the Elgin County Library published Tremaine’s Map of the County of Elgin, 1864: Commemorative Edition in Celebration of the Sesquicentennial of the County of Elgin, 1852-2002. The editor, Brian Masschaele, Archivist, Elgin County Archives, did an outstanding job of reproducing this single wall map in a large format 80 page book. Indexing was by Robert G. Moore. It is still available for purchase at a bargain price of $20 from the Elgin County Archives – 519-631-1460 x154.
[22] Tremaine’s New Exhibition, The Brooklyn Daily Eagle, 21 November 1864: 2, newspapers.com
[23] Beatrice (Nebraska) Daily Express, 19 May 1893: 4, newspapers.com
[24] Brainerd (Crow Wing County, Minnesota) Dispatch, 19 August 1898, 8, c2, Courtesy of John Van Essen, https://www.findagrave.com/memorial/75567927/george-r.-tremaine
[25] Genealogical sources for Jane are somewhat contradictory (for example the spelling of her family name before marriage) and less reliable than for her husband. She seems to have been born in Ireland in approximately 1833 per census enumerations and died after 1913, likely in Pennsylvania
[26] 1900 and 1910 United States Federal Censuses for Bradford City, PA and Bradford city directories (1894 through 1913). ancestry.com
[27] McMaster University Library has a webpage and video describing the conservation of an 1859 Tremaine County of Peel map – https://library.mcmaster.ca/news/newly-conserved-rare-map-provides-unique-snapshot-life-19th-century-ontario; West Lincoln Historical Society has an interesting report titled Conservation Treatment of Tremaine’s Map, Lincoln & Welland, Canada West (Ottawa, Canadian Conservation Institute, 2008)