The Goad's Guide | History

Peter J. Marshall
6 days ago
26 min read

Updated: 2 days ago

Prelude to Goad (1800-1875)

Fire insurance plans were detailed diagrams of town and city blocks that helped insurers calculate fire risks and determine premiums for building owners. They first appeared in England in the late eighteenth century and were hand drawn by insurance company surveyors for the exclusive use of the firm. These plans arrive in Canada in 1808 when the Phoenix Assurance Company of London (England) had them prepared for a handful of cities in the Maritimes and Quebec between 1808 and 1845.

Advances in lithographic printing in the 1840s and 1850s led to printed versions of the plans coming into general use and at the same time the arrival of the railway and consequent rapid expansion of town sizes increased the need for such plans.

Excerpt from 1858 Atlas of the City of Toronto and Vicinity.

The oldest surviving Canadian plan is the Atlas of the City of Toronto and Vicinity created by William Somerville Boulton in 1858. While not specifically labelled as a fire insurance plan, the atlas’ content was very much in line with such a purpose. Drawn at a scale of 100 feet to 1 inch, it depicted the nature and size of every structure in the coverage area including their construction material in the form of either stone or brick (denoted by red shading) or wood frame (denoted by grey) and their first- or second-class status utilizing the numerals 1 and 2. It also indicated the location of the city’s public fire alarm pull-stations using red dots.

South of the border, Daniel Alfred Sanborn responded to the need for similar plans in the United States. He created his first maps in 1866 on contract to Aetna Insurance for areas of Tennessee. Seeing the nation-wide potential of these products, he founded his own company dedicated to their production and sold them to interested insurers.

Most Sanborn maps were drawn at a scale of 50 feet to the inch allowing for a significant level of detail, with less developed suburban areas drawn at 100 or 200 feet. Pages were generally 21” by 25” in size. In addition to depicting footprints of the surveyed buildings, Sanborn noted street widths and street numbers along with an array of specifications relevant to a structure’s fire risk: building materials such as concrete, stucco siding and roofing materials, number of storeys, number of windows, location of municipal fire fighting equipment and the direction of prevailing winds. Typically the focus of these maps was a town’s business section where commercial tenants were presumably more likely to insure their properties than were private homeowners.

D. A. Sanborn fire insurance map of Guelph, 1875, revised 1878 by Charles Goad.

In the summer of 1874 Sanborn expanded his offerings into Canada, publishing maps for Quebec City and fourteen Ontario locations over the course of a year[1]. The arrival of these surveys soon caught the eye of a fellow civil engineer in Montreal by the name of Charles E. Goad.

Charles E. Goad (active 1875-1910)

Charles Edward Goad was born in England in 1848 where it appears he was self taught or served an apprenticeship in drafting before being employed in the building of public works[2]. He immigrated to Montreal in 1869 at the age of 21 and worked as an engineer on the Toronto, Grey and Bruce Railway until 1873. That year Goad married Margaret Brown and went to work with the contracting company that built the Montreal Northern Colonization Railway, first as a drafting-office manager and eventually as chief engineer.

The earliest of Goad’s business records now held by the Archives of Ontario is a circular[3] from December 1875 addressed to "Managers of Fire Insurance Companies Doing Business in the Dominion of Canada.” The 27-year-old engineer informed these men that he intended to resign from his fulltime job the following spring to produce “reliable plans of cities & towns for Insurance purposes.” He would begin with the town of Lévis opposite Quebec City on the St. Lawrence River “intending should I receive sufficient encouragement to make plans of other towns”. In his next circular two months later he explained that his choice of Lévis was due to its being “the largest [town] in Canada not surveyed by Mr. Sanborn of New York” and noted that ten of the principal insurance companies based in Montreal and Quebec City had already signed on to the venture. [4]

By April 1876 Goad had not only completed surveys of Lévis and nearby South Shore Quebec Coves but also of the business parts of five towns in western Ontario, namely Stratford, Galt, Goderich, St. Mary’s and Brampton. Writing from his newly established office at 162 St. James Street, he proposed to divide the cost of the resulting insurance plans among companies willing to fund his endeavor through advance subscriptions.

A lengthy circular issued in August 1876 provides extensive insight into Goad’s vision for his business. It began by announcing that he had surveyed another 11 towns in Southern Ontario for a total of 18 and was proposing a “general system[5]” drawn to a scale of 40 feet per inch on 25” x 21” sheets that would “show every building in the business and manufacturing parts of various towns with information as to character of buildings, roofing, firewalls, openings, exposures, occupations, tenants, water supply and appliances”. This format was virtually identical to that of the Sanborn maps save for the slightly larger scale, a variance that lasted only a few months until Goad adopted the American’s 50-foot standard. The copycat format, combined with the circular’s announcement that Goad would soon revise Sanford’s original maps, strongly suggest that Goad’s eventual takeover of his competitor’s Canadian venture was already in motion by this time.

Goad touted the benefits of his system for an industry where underwriters and head office managers based in large cities assessed applications submitted by local agents situated in smaller communities, many of which represented multiple firms. His proclaimed that his standardized plans would allow head offices to issue quotes more quickly by having the relevant background information at their fingertips, provide a practical common reference point for management and the various agents they employed, and act as a check against errors or outright false information provided by said agents.

At the same time, he acknowledged two primary objections to his proposed system: the substantial cost of the plans and the necessity of revision. Goad guaranteed that he would update the plans regularly to ensure their ongoing relevance. Of course, this only added to the cost which was considerable given the expense of surveying and the process of lithographing black and white prints on heavy duty paper and then hand stenciling them by brush with watercolours.

This 1876 Napanee, Ontario plan is one of only two extant maps from Goad's first year of business. It has been updated with revision slips to 1882.

Goad indicated that his ideal scenario would be to complete surveys of every town and city having a population above 3,000 in Ontario, Quebec, the Maritimes and Newfoundland over the next four years and then revise all those plans with 18 months of their creation along with the Sanborn maps. The estimated cost would be $6,000 per annum which would be divided by as many subscribers as he could obtain. He cited an example of 10 companies each contributing $600 per year for this service and while admitting this was a substantial sum, Goad also reminded the circular’s readers that it was but a fraction of the $4.3 million in revenue collected by the insurance industry in the year prior.

However, Goad was practical enough to acknowledge the limitations imposed on this scheme by the high cost of production and the relatively low number of potential clients. He confessed that it was “probably now premature” to execute and settled for a more modest proposition to continue surveying small groups of towns and splitting that lower cost among interested subscribers.

*April 1877 catalogue of existing plans and their purchase price.*

This would become Goad’s permanent business model. While many contemporary sources state that his customers were subscribers who leased the plans rather than owning them outright, the circulars don’t bear this out. True, Goad referred to his clientele as subscribers but apart from his wild dreams of a per annum payment in this missive, all successive circulars refer to individual pricing for each original edition and their subsequent updates. This was definitely a pay-per-use business model. Pay-before-use is actually a more apt description. The surveying process was an expensive one and Goad continually appealed to customers to purchase the resulting plans prior to their creation to offset his own investment. He would further hedge his bets by selecting new towns based on an expressed interest from at least one insurer, hoping that others would come on board once the final plans were issued.[6]

Despite his best attempts, Goad had a difficult time convincing insurers to sign on for his ventures. He had previously posted a net loss on his original seven plans and his update in the August circular indicated an even larger deficit on the 18 plans to date. By his count there were 30 insurance companies that provided service across the country and while he had received support from 21 of them, most of that was “not to the extent that their operations should warrant.”

Operating at a loss became one of two recurring themes in Goad’s circulars throughout the 1870s, frequently accompanied by admonishments to paying customers who turned a blind eye to their agents sharing plans with non-paying competitors and who took a “spasmodic” or ad hoc approach to purchasing plans instead of a “systematic” or comprehensive method that would have provided more stable funding. The second theme was Goad’s determination to forge ahead with new plans despite the financial shortfalls. He was eternally optimistic that his system would eventually become widely adopted thus spreading the survey costs across a wider base and lowering the price per customer.

The Goad's System

This double-sided, 9" x 4" handout from 1879 was both practical and promotional. Its nominal use was as a handy scale to measure distances in Goad's insurance plans. One side of the heavy card stock featured the default scales used for the majority of sheets in a plan (40 or 50 feet to the inch) while the other side had smaller scales used for sheets covering suburban areas (100 feet) and key plans (400 feet and 500 feet).

Supplementing these were illustrations touting the benefits of Goad's new universal system of surveys over the traditional practice of field agents each employing their own variation. On one side, exasperated insurance company managers attempt to interpret agents' "old style diagrams" in contrast to a group of executives leisurely referencing the "new method plans". On the reverse, an agent draws his own diagrams while his frustrated customers wait impatiently in comparison to a competitor referring a stream of satisfied clients to his copy of "Goad's plans".

Also included is a promotion for Goad's self-made publication "Insurance Society" which features ongoing updates of the places surveyed for his new plans.

In January 1878 Goad began to revise the 15 Sanborn plans using a novel approach designed to reduce costs. Instead of redrawing, reprinting and recolouring entire sheets he would create cutouts for only the portions that required updates. Subscribers would then ship their original plans to him for his staff to affix the patches and return the maps.

Even when obliged to take on work as a chief engineer for Halifax and Cape Breton Railway to supplement his income in 1877 and 1878, Goad continued his prolific output.

By April 1877 the 12 additional surveys proposed in his August 1876 circular were completed, bringing the total number of original plans to 30.
In February 1878 Goad closed the deal on buying out Sanborn’s Canadian subscribers. They agreed to a collective price of $600 which Goad would pay in the form of subscriptions to his own plans.
A September 1877 proposal to expand into towns in the “Lower Provinces” received support for Goad’s first three Maritimes plans which were completed by summer 1878.
By December 1878 Goad’s inventory had more than doubled from the year prior to a total of 83, albeit at a loss to date of $2,100.
A price list published just a month later included a total of 87 plans, consisting of 61 communities in Ontario, 11 in Québec and 15 in the Maritime provinces. The most notable addition was Montreal, a significant accomplishment considering that the city was twice as large as Toronto.
In March 1880 Goad proposed to survey Winnipeg that summer making it the first municipality west of Ontario to be added to his ever-growing body of work
Two months later the tally had reached 135 cities and towns, and Goad relocated to his offices to St. Francis Xavier Street.
June 1880 marked another milestone when Goad published his own Toronto plan replacing Sanborn’s 15-sheet map with a substantial 54-sheet tome. Although the initiative had been supported by 12 subscribers this still wasn’t enough to cover his costs.
A January 1881 circular lamented the number of companies that borrowed plans rather than purchasing them, particularly the head offices of British-based insurers (i.e. the majority of insurance companies operating in Canada[7]) who had yet to be convinced of the product’s value. However, Goad claimed that his system was now well established with a total of 212 surveys available, and that the number of subscribers was continually increasing.
The survey total reached 280 in 1883 and with the great majority of those being for Ontario communities Goad decided to open a Toronto office that same year, initially located at 62 Church Street.

On top of all this, Goad somehow also found time to create his first atlas and launch a trade magazine: the Montreal atlas was published in eight parts between January 1879 and September 1881 and in the former year he also began publication of Insurance Society.[8]

Charles & Margaret Goad, Christmas 1879

By March 1885 Goad had produced 340 plans in the Dominions of Canada and Newfoundland and it seemed there was no end to his business’ expansion. However, the successive months brought a dramatic change of fortune. In May of that year Goad’s wife Margaret died at the age of 33 leaving Charles to raise their three young children. Then in September Goad announced that his ongoing struggle to cover his costs had led him to lay off some of his staff as an alternative to raising prices. That same year he closed the Toronto office.

Faced with such dramatic setbacks Goad’s solution was true to form: sail to London to seek new opportunities.

March 1885 circular proposing the first London plan (left) and Volume 1 of the actual plan from March 1886 (right).

Goad’s London venture was an audacious one considering that he was a provincial outsider in a metropolis with a population larger than that of his adopted country and the defacto business capital of Europe. But he had two important factors working in his favour: his familiarity with many British insurers through his work with their Canadian subsidiaries and the lack of a competing offering.

The impact was immediate. In January 1886 Goad reported that he had received enough encouragement in preparing plans of London to enable him to retain and reinforce the staff working on the Canadian series. He also registered his British business as Chas. E. Goad Limited and established a London bureau. Within just two years he would produce volumes of plans for 12 cities in England, two in Scotland and one in Ireland.

At the same time as he was turning around his business, Goad also rebuilt his family. In August 1886 the 38-year-old-widower exchanged vows with 20-year-old Agnes Harriss in in Montreal. They would go on to have four children as Agnes followed him around the world, with the first one being born in London, England nine months after the wedding.

Goad returned to the expansion of his Canadian offerings in September 1887 with his first surveys in the future Alberta and Saskatchewan which were then still part of the Northwest Territories. In the following month he completed his westward push by securing the rights to D. A. Sanborn’s maps of British Columbia cities that were apparently exempt from his original deal with the American firm[9]. That same year he relocated his Montreal office to Notre Dame Street and re-opened a Toronto bureau, this time at 2 Toronto Street.

“The series now extends from the Atlantic to the Pacific Cost,” Goad proclaimed in July 1888, “embracing every plan that has been asked for by two or more Companies: and in this the fifteenth year of continuous work, comprises 423 surveys of compactly built business centres and surroundings.”

But why stop there?

Goad had first proposed expanding outside of Canada in 1883, two years before his London venture. That year he asked insurers to support the surveying of major cities in “West India Islands.”[10] However, this international initiative didn’t come to fruition until 1894 and by 1909 he had surveyed cities not just in the Caribbean but also in Mexico, Venezuela, Chile, Denmark, Egypt, France, Turkey, Mozambique and South Africa.

Back in his hometown, Goad and his wife welcomed their second son in 1890, the same year that the Montreal office returned to St. James Street although this time at the Temple Building. (When that edifice was demolished in 1906 the offices relocated to 302 St. James.) Meanwhile, the Toronto office was relocated to 15 Wellington Street West by 1900.

The Merchants Bank Building at 15 Wellington Street West, home to Goad's head office in the early 1900s. The façade was later relocated to the atrium of the current Brookfield Place building one block to the south.

The couple had their first daughter while back in London in 1898 and Goad purchased a cottage on Centre Island in Toronto Harbour sometime in the 1890s. The family permanently decamped to Toronto in 1904, first living at 108 Pembroke Street. It was here that a second daughter was born when Charles was 55 years old. The following year the family moved to 80 St. George Street.

Goad’s seemingly inexhaustible energy finally hit a wall near the end of the decade. A memoir in the American Society of Civil Engineers journal recounts his final days:

In 1909 while engaged on a survey at Valparaiso, Chile, on behalf of the Fire Offices Committee, Mr. Goad had a paralytic stroke. As soon as he could be moved he was taken to England, the voyage being of much benefit to him. After a short stay, he returned to his home in Toronto, with his health so far improved as to encourage the hope that he would be spared for a number of years, but after a journey South and a short stay in Florida, he returned to Toronto in April, 1910.

Goad suffered a second stroke not long after his return and passed away on June 10, 1910 at the age of 62. The memoir recalled him as “a man of sterling integrity and indomitable energy, never happier than when he had difficulties to surmount” ad noted that “he was entirely lacking in ostentation, and warm-hearted and loyal in his friendship.”

By the time of his death, Goad and his assistants had made plans for over 1,300 Canadian places and, after initially struggling to cover his business costs, had managed to amass a fortune worth $600,000, the equivalent of more than $16 million today.

Goad family monument in Mt. Pleasant Cemetery.

Chas E. Goad Company (1911-1917)

Following Goad’s death, his business was initially carried on by his estate's administrators until they sold it to his three sons in September of 1911. 33-year-old Charles Ernest Goad (C.E. Goad Jr.), 23-year-old Victor Albert Edward Goad (V.A.E. Goad) and 20-year-old James Lawrence Goad (J.L. Goad) agreed to the appraised purchase price of $151,000 which they would pay out over a term of 10 years. Charles Jr., who had been in charge of the British and overseas surveys for some time, took over as Managing Director of Charles E. Goad Limited in London as well as the Canadian business which was then incorporated as Chas. E. Goad Company. The first item on the new firm’s agenda was adapting to challenges from Canada’s fire insurance industry.

The industry at the time was divided into tariff or “Board” companies and independent insurers. The former were regional groups of insurance firms looking to benefit from mutual cooperation and establish a fixed “tariff of rates” for members. The first such organization was founded in Nova Scotia in 1864 and by the turn of the century others followed suit in Prince Edward Island, New Brunswick, Ontario and Quebec (combined), the Northwest Territories and British Columbia. Among these groups, fire insurance plans had progressed from a “nice to have” to a fundamental tool of the trade. Insurance plan scholar Jean Dryden explains:

The fire insurance business depended on two types of documents: the plans and the rating schedules. The plans provided detailed pictures of the structures in a community from the perspective of the risk of fire. The rating schedules established the insurance premiums charged to the insured, which of course varied according to the risk depicted in the plans. Clearly, the plans were an essential tool in the conduct of fire insurance underwriting. As a CFUA employee told the Supreme Court of Canada, “our whole schedule rating system depends upon our plans.”[11]

The CFUA referenced by Dryden was the Canadian Fire Underwriters’ Association which had jurisdiction over Ontario and Quebec. Seeking a competitive advantage for their members, they had approached Charles Goad in 1908 about either providing his surveys exclusively for their use or allowing the association to purchase a controlling interest in his business. Goad was willing but insisted on a price that was unacceptable to the CFUA. The organization persisted in their negotiations for two more years until they decided in December 1910 that they should produce their own plans instead. Their proposed Plans Department would engage a surveyor and assistants and sell its surveys at cost to member companies.

In October 1911, one month after purchasing their father’s business, Goad’s sons took a different tack in the negotiations, deciding that continuing business solely with association members outweighed the loss of sales to non-members in their largest market. Under the terms of the five-year agreement the Goad Company would revise plans for Ontario and Quebec locations every three years except in larger cities where updates would happen every 18 months. “The association’s embryonic Plans Department,” says a history of the CFUA and its successors[12], “was reduced to a skeleton staff, sufficient only to furnish plans for such small places requiring specific rating and for large manufacturing risks.” Because the Goad Company maintained copyright ownership, the CFUA kept tight control of the circulating volumes by providing them to members on a loan basis which would be revoked if an insurer left the association.

Elsewhere in the country, the Goad Company continued to publish largely unchallenged by competitors with the exception of the western region where the Western Canada Underwriters’ Association began to produce their own plans in 1913 using a format identical to Goad’s. At the same time, the firm opened a Vancouver office in 1912 to supplement their western presence which also included a Winnipeg office established in 1910.

As the contract’s termination date drew near in 1916, negotiations between the two parties began anew. Once again, the CFUA deemed the asking price to be too high and once again they took matters into their own hands. The CFUA history describes the outcome:

In December 1916, CFUA decided to allow the agreement to expire. Tariff companies purchased plans that had been loaned to them and a full complement of staff was reinstated in the Plans Department in the association’s Toronto office. Goad received $22,000 for the loaned plans about the same time the association decided to incorporate the Plans Department under a new name, the Underwriters’ Survey Bureau.

By June 1917, the bureau had surveyed seven towns and plans were ready for distribution. But Goad was not to be dispensed with so easily. He (sic) recalled all plans loaned to agents in the Maritimes. This challenge was met sharply and decisively by the CFUA. The association dispatched the bureau’s full staff to New Brunswick to draw up surveys and provide plans for towns previously mapped by Goad.

The Goad Company saw the writing on the wall. They acquiesced in late 1917 and negotiated an agreement giving the bureau the right to revise and reprint their Ontario, Quebec and Maritimes plans. In exchange they would maintain copyright of their original work. Although the London firm would continue to do business for many more decades, the era of Goad fire insurance plans in Canada had come to an end[13].

Underwriters’ Survey Bureau (1917-1964)

Undated photos from the USB/CUA era (click arrow to scroll through). Original captions stated "draughtsmen creating plans", "colouring is meticulously applied to plan sheets", "offset work in the print shop."

Beginning in 1917, the Underwriters’ Survey Bureau produced new plans for Ontario and Quebec in addition to revising existing Goad’s plans for those provinces[14]. Plans for the rest of Canada were published by The Western Canada Underwriters’ Association and the British Columbia Underwriters’ Association or under contract from the USB. In March 1931 the bureau purchased the remaining assets of the former Goad company consisting of maps, special surveys of industrial sites and, most importantly, the copyright to their insurance plans.

Disclaimer from 1937 insurance plan.

The practice of revising old Goad’s plans came to an end in 1952 when the USB introduced a new format. Plans were now printed on 13” x 13” pages at a scale of 100 feet to 1 inch that were punched with holes to be bound in ring binders. The new binding system made updates much more economical as outdated pages could easily be replaced with new versions as needed, largely eliminating the need for labour-intensive revision slips. Fire insurance plans had at last entered the modern age, the same age that would soon render them redundant.

Canadian Underwriters’ Association (1965-1973)

During the decades that the plans were being produced by the Underwriters’ Survey Bureau, its parent organization underwent some significant restructuring. In 1936 the Canadian Fire Underwriters’ Association merged with automobile and casualty insurance organizations in its Ontario and Quebec jurisdiction to become the Canadian Underwriters’ Association. Then around 1960 the country’s other regional associations gradually amalgamated under the CUA banner giving the association a national scope that finally lived up to its name. As part of this expansion, the USB was folded into the Association as its plan division and the CUA imprint began appearing on plans in 1965[15]. As before, the plans were for the exclusive use of Association members who were required to return them upon the publication of a new edition or upon leaving the organization.

The new version of the CUA lasted only until June 1974 when it was dissolved and replaced by the Insurers Advisory Organization of Canada. Instead of regulation, the IAO’s mandate was to provide its members with advice and information. At the same time, the need for expensive fire insurance plans came to an end. “The existence of mandatory building codes and standards for fire services,” explains Jean Dryden, “meant that data about firefighting, fire prevention services, and building construction could be acquired from municipalities. The insurance business had developed cheaper, less cumbersome ways of recording and analyzing liability data, and plans were no longer needed.”

Although the IAO did not produce any new maps, a delayed 1973 revision to the Winnipeg plan was issued in 1975 under the CUA imprint and became the last official publication. It was a fitting milestone, falling exactly one hundred years after Charles Goad created his first surveys. This could have well been the end of the story for Canada’s fire insurance plans but instead it marked the beginning of a new chapter.

Goad Competitors

Plans of Toronto by C. N Lloyd, Saskatoon by WCFUA and Beebe Plain by Mount Royal Assurance.

Other Canadian insurance plan publishers consisted of C. N. Lloyd (1946-1955) and Provincial Surveys Limited (1936-1945) which covered Ontario, Mount Royal Assurance Company (1910s) which operated in Quebec, and Western Atlas Company (1910-1912) and Western Canada Fire Underwriters Association (1910s) which surveyed towns and cities in Manitoba, Saskatchewan and Alberta.

All used the same standard scale and the same size sheets as the Goad plans and most even used the same symbols and colour coding.

Legacy

Just as underwriters’ need for fire insurance plans was coming to an end, urban historians’ interest in the maps began to emerge.

In 1973 Robert Hayward of the National Map Library (now Library and Archives Canada) wrote that “until recently, few realized that there existed plans and atlases that were exclusively Canadian in nature. With thanks to certain individuals with keen archival senses, some have survived.” Those researchers who were aware of them faced the dual problems of availability and accessibility which Hayward was hoping to resolve. “In an effort to build upon these fine, yet limited, resources, the National Map Collection is conducting an inventory of these historic documents. Urban historians and others may be aware of the location of copies of these plans and atlases. I would appreciate being informed of such collections.”[16]

Only one year later, the greatest collection of all became available when the IAO, seeing little value in the outdated maps they had inherited, fortuitously decided to sell off their holdings. In swooped Ed Phelps, independent publisher and University of Western Ontario librarian, to purchase most of their inventory. In the fall of 1976 Phelps issued a typewritten catalogue of his mint condition plans that were now being offered for re-sale.

It would seem that the National Map Library was one of Phelps’ biggest customers as the 1977 publication Fire Insurance Plans in the National Map Collection was prefaced with an acknowledgement of his cooperation. Robert Hayward’s introduction explained that “large-scale urban maps are now the most sought-after documents in the National Map Collection, a phenomenon attributable to the growing interest in Canada’s urban past” and went on to describe the origins of the institution’s collection:

Beginning from a small nucleus acquired in the 1920s, the holdings of the National Map Collection were enriched in 1973 with the acquisition of the Canadian plans and business records from the English map publishers, Chas. E. Goad, Ltd.[17] Two years later, as a result of the decision taken by the Insurers’ Advisory Organization to sell its stock of plans, a further, and by far the largest, addition was made. The number of plans in the National Map Collection now totals two thousand, consisting of twenty-nine thousand sheets documenting more than fourteen hundred places.

Hayward conceded that this inventory was by no means the definitive listing of Canadian fire insurance plans, estimating that the catalogue included only about one third of all surviving plans and noting that there were significant gaps in the holdings. However, he hoped that the publication of this booklet would encourage the search for additional plans both in public institutions and in private collections and lead to “a greater appreciation and the further collecting, cataloguing and use of these valuable cartographic documents”. Phelps noted in his own catalogue that many obsolete plans were known to exist “in the hands of insurance companies and their agents” and that he was willing to purchase them in light of their considerable research value.

Ed Phelps

At the time that the IAO collection came up for sale, Ed Phelps was an active historian and archivist, head of the Regional Collection at the University of Western Ontario’s D. B. Weldon Library, and publisher of dry chronicles of “unenticing arcana” in the words of one colleague. His collective interests made him a natural fit to acquire the historical fire insurance plans and it appears that, despite issuing his 1976 catalogue and a 1983 follow up, his motives were not entirely financial. His re-sale prices ranged from $12 for 3-sheet editions to $110 for a 222-page volume. That converts to an average of $12.30 per sheet adjusted for inflation, a bargain considering that a single page can retail for over $1,000 today. Furthermore, he seems to have been generous in his giving away copies to various academic institutions. Some editions held by UWO bear a sticker identifying Phelps as the donor and the University of British Columbia’s collection of plans of 600 cities and towns was donated to their library by Phelps in 1982 after he had sold off the majority of his collection.

Phelps also played a significant role in the creation of microfiche copies of plans held by himself and UWO in the 1970s and ‘80s which allowed the maps to be more accessible in the days prior to the internet.

Phelps’ extensive expertise regarding Goad’s maps is acknowledged by the authors of the National Map Collection’s Fire Insurance Plans catalogue and the Canadian Catalogue of Fire Insurance Plans and his close working relationship with the IAO is evidenced by his publishing of the organization’s 1985 centennial history and his assembly of the book’s graphic materials.

Donated plan from the University of Western Ontario collection.

This was an ambitious aspiration considering the minimal quantity of plans originally printed - only 50 to 100 copies of each - and their various publishers’ policy of “systematic destruction” as Hayward aptly phrased it. Yet over the years more and more privately held editions found their way into public collections. Some were provided by their original owners such as the volumes of Toronto plans from the 1910s now held at York University’s archives that were once the property of the Toronto Harbour Commissioners. Many other volumes, according to the Archives of Ontario’s collection overview, were plucked from dumpsters.

As the diaspora of retired plans was consolidating itself in public collections the IOA found itself regretting their decision to let the maps out of their hands. In the late 1980s, new environmental regulations required developers to clean up lands formerly employed for industrial purposes which made the historical land use information in the old plans highly valuable. The IAO demurely asked various libraries and archives if they could borrow back their maps to copy them for use as a new revenue stream. At the same time, their legal department threatened the same institutions with litigation if they allowed anyone else to reproduce editions they considered to be still within copyright[18].

The IAO christened their new service the Historical Environmental Information Reporting System or “HEIRS”. The service was inherited by the Underwriters’ Adjustment Bureau in 1992 when they purchased IAO, then by business and IT consulting firm CGI which acquired UAB in 2002, followed by SCM Insurance Services which bought CGI’s claim and risk management operations in 2008. In 2012 SCM formed Opta Information Intelligence which became responsible for the historical insurance plans through its Enviroscan service. Opta was subsequently acquired by Verisk in 2022 which retired the HEIRS trademark but continues to offer the plans through Enviroscan.

Meanwhile, the continued growth of public collections in the late twentieth century was made evident in 1995's Canadian Fire Insurance Plans in Ontario Collections. The tome listed almost 500 editions held by various libraries and archives across the province, many of which had multiple copies available. Response to the book was so favourable that the authors expanded it into Catalogue of Canadian Fire Insurance Plans in 2002.

Access to these collections took a major leap forward with the advent of the internet. In the first two decades of the new millennium many institutions posted high-resolution scans of atlases and plans online, although concerns about copyright infringement limited the initiative to maps produced prior to 1930.

Library and Archives Canada is just one of many organizations that have digitized their early insurance plans.

Happily, this limitation is a temporal one and by 2065 the entire catalogue will be theoretically available to anyone, anywhere at ay time. This would no doubt have been unfathomable to Charles Goad as he penned his first circular late in 1875. But he may have been pleased to know that despite the successive insurance organizations having authored more editions over a longer time span than his family business did, researchers to this day still regularly refer to the collected works simply as Goad’s Plans.

Notes

PRELUDE TO GOAD

[1] Sanborn surveyed Toronto, London, Guelph, Hamilton, St. Catharines, Brantford, Kingston, Belleville, Cobourg, Port Hope, Lindsay, Peterborough, Ottawa and Brockville. Only the Guelph map has survived.

CHARLES E. GOAD

[2] Dictionary of Canadian Biography indicates that there is no verifiable evidence to support later claims that he was educated at Oxford University.

[3] “Circular” was the term used by Goad for his official correspondence typically delivered as a mass mailing to potential and existing customers.

[4] There are two contradictions here. In a later circular from 1889 Goad references his “first series of Block Plans (1874)” which would predate the Lévis plan but there is no indication of what places were surveyed nor who they were produced for and there is no other reference to these works in his records. As for Lévis being the largest Canadian place not surveyed by Sanborn, the American surveyor’s original maps did not include Montreal, the most populous city in the country by far.

[5] This is the Goad’s first reference to what he would later label “a system of Block Plans of Cities and Towns for the use of Insurance Companies”. Goad never defined what qualified it as a formal “system” and curiously announced its official completion in 1880 by which point he had already published more than 135 plans.

[6] Goad did provide some copies on long term loan but only to local agents who would receive a copy at no charge for each insurer they represented that had purchased their own copy.

[7] A March 1883 circular included a breakdown of the nationality of insurance companies doing business in Canada: 17 were British agencies, 4 were American and only 7 were Canadian

[8] A memoir of Goad's life in Transactions of the American Society of Civil Engineers states that he founded the publication in 1881 but that is contradicted by a reference to the journal in Goad's handout from January 1879 (featured above). Goad sold the journal a few years later due to increasing demands on his time and it became The Insurance and Financial Chronicle.

[9] Sanborn had created plans for Granville, Victoria and Yale in 1885.

CHAS. E GOAD COMPANY

[10] Specifically Cuba, Jamaica, Barbados, Trinidad, Antiqua, St. Thomas, and St. Kitts.

[11] “Copyright in Fire Insurance Plans” article in Archivaria, The Journal of the Association of Canadian Archivists Number 91, Spring-Summer 2021. The Supreme Court reference pertains to a 1930s Canadian Fire Underwriters’ Association lawsuit against non-members that were copying their plans.

[12] The Underwriters, the History of the Insurers’ Advisory Organization and its Predecessors, the Canadian Fire Underwriters' Association and the Canadian Underwriters' Association (1883-1983).

Christopher L. Hives. London, Phelps Publishing Company, 1985.

[13] Although the Chas. E. Goad Company was succeeded by Goad’s Atlas and Plans Company, it lasted only long enough to publish a 1923 revision of the Toronto atlas.

UNDERWRITERS’ SURVEY BUREAU

[14] Because the USB wasn’t incorporated until October 1917 there were three imprints in use that year: the CFUA prior to October, the USB after October and the Chas. E. Goad Company throughout the year.

CANADIAN UNDERWRITERS’ ASSOCIATION

[15] Numerous historical sources conflate the amalgamation of the CUA with the appearance of the CUA imprint in 1965. However, Underwriters, the History of the Insurers’ Advisory Organization and its Predecessors specifies that the former took place prior to the latter: WCUA and BCUA were amalgamated with the CUA on January 1, 1959 and the remaining associations amalgamated on January 1, 1962, three years prior to the appearance of the imprint.

LEGACY

[16] May 1973 issue of Urban History Review.

[17] Unlike the Canadian division of Goad’s, the UK bureau had continued to operate until the early 1970s.

[18] The IAO claimed that any plans remained subject to copyright until 90 years after their publication. The claim and its impact are explored in greater detail in the COLLECTIONS section of this Guide.

Illustration Credits