Mapping The Brown Homestead
“Geography has made us neighbours. History has made us friends…”
A screenshot of Brown family property in The Brown Homestead’s newest virtual exhibit “Mapping The Brown Homestead”
Introduction
American President John F. Kennedy spoke these words in 1961 when addressing the Canadian Parliament, referring to the relationship between the two countries. These words could apply to any variety of scenarios, including stories from The Brown Homestead. The vast wilderness that was Niagara in the late 18th century became settled by Loyalist families originating from different parts of the Thirteen Colonies, united in the common experience of losing their homes during the American Revolution. The natural benefits of the land were used by settlers to help many achieve success both socially and economically, forming a close-knit community of hard-working pioneers. Over time, these families worked together, intermarried, and built the foundations of Canadian society and the Niagara community that we know today.
The Brown Homestead was inhabited by a wide array of peoples over the past centuries, including the Haudenosaunee, Anishinaabe and Attawandaron peoples, and this changing cultural landscape holds a rich history that can be expressed multiple ways. We could write a book about each of these people, the geographical boundaries of the land they occupied, and how this changed from generation to generation. After all, isn’t that what historians do? We hope that one day a book like this will become a reality, but for now we have chosen instead to make use of modern technology and the interactive nature of digital tools to help us tell some of our story. There are benefits to sharing history in a digital format, especially for visual learners, or busy folks just looking for a quick synopsis. So without further ado, you can click on the link below to explore this exciting virtual exhibit, or feel free to keep reading to learn more about spatial history and how historians are using Geographic Information Systems (GIS) to drive studies of the past.
What is Historical GIS?
Mapping The Brown Homestead was created using a software program called ArcGIS, which is developed by Esri to help users build interactive web-based maps and applications. As you might imagine, GIS is not a traditional item in the historian’s toolbelt. It is typically used by individuals employed in fields such as urban planning, forestry or environmental conservation, cartography and other geography-related vocations. Its capabilities in data analysis are also useful for jobs in crime statistics, real estate, archaeology, app development and much more. But what about the humanities? How can we use GIS to investigate and present our studies of the past?
When used in this context, we will often use terms like “historical GIS” or “spatial history.” Historical GIS demands a closer look at the land itself, guiding historians to a deeper understanding of the ways in which geography impacted development in the past. History and geography are inherently intertwined. So why not use GIS, Google Earth, and other spatial platforms to our advantage?
Digital technology has revolutionized the way in which historians visualize the past, and software like ArcGIS has turned scholarship into a more interactive experience, providing visualizations to both support research conclusions AND to directly drive historical analyses. Examples of historical GIS projects can include quantitative analyses of migrations or demographic changes over time. However, it could also help us analyze more abstract concepts by using the typical qualitative sources used by historians, such as books, personal letters, and diaries. Spatial history projects now engage with topics such as urban history, environmental history, rural history, and include professionals from a range of disciplines like geography, earth science, archaeology, ethnography, and sociology.
One noteworthy spatial history project is that of Brock University Map Librarian Emeritus Colleen Beard, who in 2010 created an interactive webtool to examine the historic Welland Canals here in St. Catharines. She used historic aerial photographs, maps and audio interviews from Brock’s GIS Library and Archives & Special Collections and uploaded them to Google Earth. Users can click on point symbols, revealing photos, maps, or interviews that identify its specific history, giving people a tour-like experience from their own computer screen.
A screenshot of the interactive layers in the WebMap
GIS tools are useful for analyzing connections between people across both space and time. They can help us visualize things like shifting political borders or patterns in activity that are often determined by geographic features. In our case, we are using GIS in its most simple form by outlining the historical boundaries of The Brown Homestead and showing how they evolved since the 18th century.
Spatial history, or historical GIS might sound confusing, but it really doesn’t have to be complicated. With our project we started small, and discussed the different avenues of historical research that GIS could offer for our purposes. We wanted to show what it meant for different families to live at The Brown Homestead and decided to move forward with the ArcGIS platform, creating a WebMap as the foundation of the project, and presenting the results in a StoryMap.
We have completed a lot of research on the history of this site so far, and this exhibit addressed our need for a method of presenting the information in a way that is easy to understand. Mapping The Brown Homestead offers a guided tour through the changing cultural landscape of our site over time; from its Indigenous roots through the Loyalist era and into the modern age. This special place has been home to four different families since the 18th century, and is the traditional territory of Indigenous peoples long before European settlement. The Brown Homestead functioned as an active farm for almost 200 years throughout the 19th and 20th centuries, and is currently situated on approximately 7.5 acres of land. However, when the Loyalist John Brown first built this house back in 1796 he actually owned over 1,200 acres, including much of Shorthills Provincial Park.
A screenshot of Canadian soldiers marching down Pelham Road in The Brown Homestead’s newest virtual exhibit “Mapping The Brown Homestead”
As caretakers of this important heritage site, we often wonder what life would have been like here centuries ago. By visualizing the land that the Browns and subsequent families inhabited, we can better understand the history of the site and its place within the Niagara community during each "era" of its existence.
In addition to displaying the physical changes to this site, we are using GIS to interact with historical maps of Niagara. This technology allows us to geo-reference digital versions of historical maps, and layer them on top of the modern basemap as well as any polygon layers we create. This is useful because we can then match up the locations of historical places with what exists there today, and compare the two by switching the layers on and off. Give it a try!
Historical GIS can help us discuss larger themes in history as well. When we see how Loyalist families like the Browns began to sell their land and/or split it between their children in their wills during the early 1800s, this brings up socio-political questions around class structures, kinship ties, relationships with governing bodies and more, that could be addressed within the StoryMap if desired. Viewing historical events through the lens of geography can sometimes help us think about the significance of these moments from a fresh perspective.
Innovative Thinking
TBH staff discussing site restoration design possibilities
Using GIS to demonstrate how our site has changed over time is a good example of Innovative Thinking, one of our core values, in practice. We believe that adopting contemporary approaches and balancing them with the use of traditional methods helps build a path from the past to the present that empowers us to continue our journey into the future. Historical GIS combines technology with traditional historical research practices. To complete this project, we still had to hit the books, pull out our old maps and land records and figure out the exact boundaries of the land and its particular owners at various points in time. By using GIS, we were able to make this history come to life in an interactive story-telling format. For those of you who are visual learners, we hope you’ll appreciate not just reading about the history of this place, but seeing the changing layers of history from the 18th century to the present.
Most excitingly, this is just the beginning! We plan to expand this program in the future by creating more interactive maps that tell other parts of The Brown Homestead’s story. We’d like to delve into the Brown family ancestry some more and show how the family immigrated from their German origins through New York and eventually settled in Upper Canada in the late 18th century, propelled by war, religion, politics, etc. We’d also like to talk about the descendants of the family and display where subsequent generations have settled since then, demonstrating those fascinating networks of immigration across the continent. In a separate but related vein, technology continues to expand in the realms of Augmented Reality (AR) and Virtual Reality (VR), allowing for the creation of 3D imagery which we hope to incorporate into the maps in the future. There are so many stories to be told and so many potential avenues for telling them, and we are excited to see where the next few years will take us.
A screenshot of Chellew family property, overlaid on the 1876 map of Louth Township
If you haven’t already, we encourage you to explore this virtual exhibit today! Also, if you are interested in being part of our mapping project as it unfolds, please reach out and let us know. We are always looking for advice and input on the technical side of things and would love to expand our team of GIS advisors. As the digital humanities expand our access to sources and analytical tools, we hope to see more historians taking a spatial approach towards studying history. Don’t worry - video isn’t going to kill the radio star! The study of history will always remain the same foundationally, with all those lovely books, articles and artefacts, but we’d be foolish to ignore any modern invention that might help us as teaching tools. Thanks for being part of our journey!