Sanborn Maps
pvernon
Betatester 🖼️ 34 images Traveler
All,
If anyone has ever been interested in what American towns and cities used to look like here is a great resource.
https://www.loc.gov/collections/sanborn-maps/
"The Sanborn map collection consists of a uniform series of large-scale maps, dating from 1867 to the present and depicting the commercial, industrial, and residential sections of some twelve thousand cities and towns in the United States, Canada, and Mexico. The maps were designed to assist fire insurance agents in determining the degree of hazard associated with a particular property and therefore show the size, shape, and construction of dwellings, commercial buildings, and factories as well as fire walls, locations of windows and doors, sprinkler systems, and types of roofs. The maps also indicate widths and names of streets, property boundaries, building use, and house and block numbers.
The Sanborn collection includes some fifty thousand editions of fire insurance maps comprising an estimated seven hundred thousand individual sheets. The Library of Congress holdings represent the largest extant collection of maps produced by the Sanborn Map Company."
The University Of Utah also has a collection that only covers Utah.
Have fun!
If anyone has ever been interested in what American towns and cities used to look like here is a great resource.
https://www.loc.gov/collections/sanborn-maps/
"The Sanborn map collection consists of a uniform series of large-scale maps, dating from 1867 to the present and depicting the commercial, industrial, and residential sections of some twelve thousand cities and towns in the United States, Canada, and Mexico. The maps were designed to assist fire insurance agents in determining the degree of hazard associated with a particular property and therefore show the size, shape, and construction of dwellings, commercial buildings, and factories as well as fire walls, locations of windows and doors, sprinkler systems, and types of roofs. The maps also indicate widths and names of streets, property boundaries, building use, and house and block numbers.
The Sanborn collection includes some fifty thousand editions of fire insurance maps comprising an estimated seven hundred thousand individual sheets. The Library of Congress holdings represent the largest extant collection of maps produced by the Sanborn Map Company."
The University Of Utah also has a collection that only covers Utah.
Have fun!
Comments
Colorado
http://cudl.colorado.edu/luna/servlet/view/all?sort=city%2Cdate%2Csheet
Missouri
http://dl.mospace.umsystem.edu/mu/islandora/object/mu%3A138690
Pennsylvania
https://libraries.psu.edu/about/collections/sanborn-fire-insurance-maps
It is sort of hit or miss. California seems to be a miss, which surprises me given the past resources the state had available.
I've created Google Maps overlays with Sanborn maps and it is amazing to see how many old buildings are still standing in some small towns. (One of my hobbies is metal detecting, so I have used Sanborn maps and old 15' maps to find sites of interest.)
There were also competitors to Sanborn...
http://digicoll.manoa.hawaii.edu/maps/index.php?c=1
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Tim