Part 2: Cleaning out the 'Hoods
For a Historical game, I really would suggest that you start with a clean neighborhood template to avoid having the Maxis townies generate and overrun your lovely, historic neighborhood in their hideous leather jackets and cheetah-print tights. I have been using Custom Maps and have not tried this with an empty Maxis map, but I would assume they would be fine as well.
If you follow the instructions provided below, then you should have a World that is populated only by the Sims that you create, with few exceptions. The game WILL generate necessary NPCs like the mailman, paperboy, drivers, Charlatan, etc, no matter what, but they can be made to fit with your theme ahead of time, which I will cover in the Default Replacements section.

There are two good tutorials I've used:
Sims Wikia
Simgaroop: Empty vs Clean Templates: How to Create a Custom Neighborhood.

Clean and Empty Neighborhood Templates
Jawusa at MTS made some clean and tested templates for both Neighborhood and Stealth Hood templates. Instructions for install are in this post.

Required Mods:
Pescado/MATY
antiredundancy
notownieregen
nossrespawn
nostrayrespawn
nodormierespawn
Cyjon
CJ-TownieApartmentResidents
CJ-ThereCanBeOnlyOneProfessor
I would like to toss Nysha's No Apartment Regen in there as well, because CJ's mod alone did not prevent new townies from being spawned in my clean hood when I tested out my Gypsy Camp Apartments. After installing this one, however, it was fixed. Note, this spawning issue was ONLY with Apartments, normal residences were fine.
Try to reserve a Testing Hood, separate from your Main Hood, specifically for making sure everything is working as planned and not generating new, unwanted Sims.