?Final Price Realized includes Buyer’s Premium added to Hammer Price
Estimate: $ 1,500 - $ 2,500
(PICTORIAL MAPS -- MANUSCRIPT.) Peter Reynolds Furse. Some of the Story of Southern Ontario. Pen and ink map of Ontario from Lake Huron to Montreal drawn on an untrimmed deckle-edged sheet of "JWhatman/1959" watermarked wove paper; 27 3/4x40 1/2 inches overall; minimal margin soiling with one small closure at lower edge. Hampton, New Brunswick, 1963
Manuscript notation pasted to the lower left margin reads: "First hand-coloured Edition. Limited to 300. Copy number: ~"; such a label would implicate publication, though we have been unable to trace any record of a printed example.
Peter Furse was a British Navy officer who began his service in World War I at age 17, during which time he received his first exposure to map drafting. After the war he continued his education at the University of Cambridge and when World War II came, he again served with the Royal Navy, ultimately elevating to the rank of Lieutenant Commander. After spending several years in Africa, Furse and his wife Barbara settled down in the village of Hampton, New Brunswick, Canada. There he spent his retirement years creating and publishing well-studied whimsical pictorial cartography in the mid-1960s.
Here Furse has rendered an incredibly detailed manuscript map that richly describes the regional history of southern Ontario from the age of discovery to the mid-twentieth century. A small sampling of the illustrated anecdotes includes:
1849 the first sod turned for Great Western Railway, at London; 1883 the first free public library in Ontario at Guelph; 1755 the first Canadian Navy on Lake Ontario; 1779 the first farms built on Niagara peninsula; 1952 an oil pipeline from Manitoba & refinery completed at Petrolia; 1922 U.S.A. prohibition, $65,000 bootleg wrecked on Long Point, Lake Erie, not one bottle for customs;1854 the first "strike" by Canadian labor, printers in Toronto; 1875 World's first telephone by Alexander Graham Bell at Brantford; 1813 U.S. burned Queenstown & Niagara, British burned Buffalo in retaliation; 1615 Pere le Caron built the first European house in Ontario. One room combining living & chapel, in which he said the first mass in the Province, at Carhagouha; 1866 the first Ontario gold rush at Marmora; 1535 Cartier used "Canada" to describe the region. 1791 named "Upper Canada". 1840 "Western", 1867 "Ontario".
