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Sanborn Fire Insurance MapsBy Chris Nehls, Geostat Center and Department of History, University of Virginia A Brief History:Although the craft of creating maps for fire insurance purposes has existed for two centuries, the American insurance industry spurred the growth of insurance map companies on an unprecedented scale in the last half of the nineteenth century. D. A. Sanborn created the most successful of these companies in 1867, founding the Sanborn National Insurance Diagram Bureau in New York City, after successfully surveying Boston for fire insurance purposes. Despite Sanborn's death in 1883, the company expanded and purchased other mapping companies as it grew throughout the rest of the nineteenth century, emerging as simply the Sanborn Map Company in 1902. Sanborn systematized and added aesthetic appeal to an industry already a century old in the late 1800s. The creation of maps for insurance purposes originated in fire-prone London in the late eighteenth century, as insurers attempted to gain accurate information about insured buildings. This practice came to the United States shortly after independence, and a fledgling industry of producing maps for insurance purposes developed in cities across the country. By the middle of the 1800s, most cities in the East and Midwest supported mapping companies. The company employed surveyors in each state and systematized the map-producing process, introducing a system of standards for accuracy and design that the company published in 1905. While the New York suburb of Pelham served as the company's headquarters, it maintained regional offices in San Francisco and Chicago. Sanborn employed such a large number of surveyors so that its clients could "incur [sic] large financial risks without making personal examinations of the properties," as its employees' manual stated in 1905. Its most famous surveyor was Daniel Carter Beard, who joined the Sanborn Company in 1872 and later founded the Boy Scouts of America. Most Sanborn maps were drawn at a scale of 50 feet to an inch on 21-by-25 sheets of paper until after World War II. They detailed the location and material composition of all buildings within a city or town, noted the strength of fire departments, location of water and gas mains, and labeled most public buildings by name, including churches and companies. Buildings were color-coded according to their composition. The work of coloring maps often fell to individual artists, who painted on lithographs (often themselves hand-drawn) as printing often proved uneconomical for small orders. Maps were sold primarily to national or regional underwriting associations. Standardization helped make Sanborn a virtual monopoly by 1920, and by the late 1930s the company had surveyed 13,000 towns. Fire insurance maps, therefore, are commonly referred to simply as Sanborn maps. They commonly cost $12 to $200 in the 1930s. The Sanborn Company served its clients vigorously, often resurveying immediately after disasters to note buildings that had survived and those that had been lost. When the Chicago stockyards burned in a fire that broke out on a Saturday in 1934, the Sanborn prepared an updated map of the damaged area the following Monday. More gradual changes, noted by yearly company surveys, were made by pasting small stickers or patches on existing maps. The post-World War II era held diminishing needs for new fire insurance maps, as insurance companies either found other means of recording data or created their own engineering divisions. The Sanborn Company nevertheless continues to revise existing maps for 150 cities. The Sanborn Company is currently a division of Environmental Data Resources, Inc. (EDR) of Southport, CT. Map Uses for Scholars:Today, Sanborn Maps provide invaluable detail to historians, genealogists, urban planners, architectural historians, environmentalists, economists, and many other specialists and scholars. Because of the maps' labeling of the type, use, building material used in construction, flammable material on site, and even name of specific buildings in towns and cities they have become increasingly popular primary sources. The town of Staunton, Virginia employed Sanborn maps from the late 1800s to assist its historic preservation efforts. "Sanborn maps gave us very detailed information about when buildings were constructed for many sections of town and alterations beginning in the 1880s," William Frazier, director of Historic Staunton told Historic Preservation in 1993. "When we began our façade-improvement plan, we again consulted the information from the Sanborn maps to determine an accurate appearance for a building at a specific date." Collections:The Library of Congress holds the most extensive collection of Sanborn Maps, with over 700,000 maps in its collection, which were deposited in accordance with copyright law. This collection is not complete, however. EDR and the Library of Congress are currently pursuing a project that will digitize these maps for distribution over the Internet. Alderman Library contains a sizeable collection of facsimile Sanborn Maps from cities and towns within Virginia on microfilm. Most cities and towns were first surveyed in the 1880s. The Government Information Department of Alderman Library houses 29 reels of Sanborn Maps on microfilm. This collection contains microfilm produced by Chadwick-Healey, which reproduced Sanborn maps from the Library of Congress collection, and from University Publications, which reproduced more recent sheets from other archives, primarily those of the Sanborn Company. Special Collections at Alderman Library holds the actual map sheets for Charlottesville from 1907 and 1920. Sources:Fortune. "Map Monopoly." Feb. 1937. 41-42. Keister, Kim. "Charts of Change." Historic Preservation, vol. 45 no. 3. May/June, 1993. Ristow, Walter W. Fire Insurance Maps in the Library of Congress. Washington, D. C: Library of Congress, 1981. Sanborn Map Company. Description and Utilization of the Sanborn Map. New York. 1953. |
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