Sanborn Fire Insurance Maps

May 24, 2007 8:15 PM

Since 1867, Sanborn Fire Insurance Maps have been used to assess fire insurance liability in United States cities. With their high level of detail and color-coding to indicate the materials used to construct the buildings, the maps have since become invaluable tools to historians, urban planners, preservationists, and genealogists. A few collections of cities and states have been digitized and made available online: Utah, South Carolina, Georgia, and Florida to name a few.
posted by marxchivist (16 comments total)

These maps are available in their original form (21" x 25" color lithographed sheets on heavy paper stock) at many University Libraries and archives. The largest online collection is available through ProQuest, but that costs money. Many public and university libraries offer online access to the ProQuest collections for their users.
posted by marxchivist at 8:15 PM on May 24, 2007

Missouri residents can get an account at the Kansas City Public Library that will give them access to all of the Sanborn maps for Missouri and Kansas. Unfortunately the maps are in black and white rather than the original color. The University of Missouri-Columbia is digitizing the original colored maps for Missouri and will have them online later this year.

Good post!
posted by LarryC at 8:50 PM on May 24, 2007

This is so cool. I was just using these maps last week at the local history room at my public library while i was reading up about the house I grew up in.

Thanks for the link.
posted by serazin at 8:51 PM on May 24, 2007

Great post, thanks.
posted by Kraftmatic Adjustable Cheese at 8:51 PM on May 24, 2007

I love me some Sanborns. The fact that they updated/redrew their maps every several years make them a great way to see changes in communities/building over time. Someone needs to start storing (and making available) periodic snapshots of Google Earth level satellite photos.
posted by Rock Steady at 8:57 PM on May 24, 2007

How neat!
posted by Pope Guilty at 9:04 PM on May 24, 2007

Don't forget that environmental consultants and industrial hygienists consult Sanborns as a primary source of information when doing Phase 1 Environmental Site Assessments.
posted by chlorus at 9:09 PM on May 24, 2007

I have been playing around converting PDF Sanborns to jpegs and importing them into Google Earth as historic overlays. Big fun.
posted by LarryC at 12:09 AM on May 25, 2007

Bad people: please don't use these to plan firestorms using remote controlled incendiary devices.
posted by StickyCarpet at 5:48 AM on May 25, 2007

Marxchivist, I love you. I've been looking for something like this for a while now and unbelievably it's been available to me this whole time through my university library and I had no idea. Thank you!
posted by Jess the Mess at 7:20 AM on May 25, 2007

You can also view Portland, Oregon's Sanborn maps (spanning several decades) for free via the Multnomah County website. They're neat.
posted by cmonkey at 8:28 AM on May 25, 2007

Err, Multnomah County library website.
posted by cmonkey at 8:28 AM on May 25, 2007

Temple University's Urban Archive had lovely examples of these, but to my knowledge they had never been digitized.
posted by rzklkng at 8:44 AM on May 25, 2007

Flagged as "Fantastic!"

I've blown the past 2 hours digging through these.

Neat stuff!
posted by drstein at 10:26 AM on May 25, 2007

Yay! We use the Sanborn maps daily where I work. They are indeed a treasure with incredible detail, and artful as well. It never occurred to me to look them up online or wonder if they'd been digitized. It looks like the map of our city isn't digitized anywhere yet, though. Onward and upward.
posted by Miko at 10:38 AM on May 25, 2007

The Seattle Public Library has them too; the link can be found here. Requires a SPL library card, though.
posted by litlnemo at 4:51 PM on May 25, 2007