Fire Insurance Map
Tombstone, Arizona
(New York: Sanborn Map and
Publishing Company, 1886)
Geography & Map Division
Insurance Maps of
Pittsburg [sic], Pennsylvania. Vol. 2.
New York: Sanborn-Perris
Map Company, 1893
Color lithograph printed map
Geography & Map Division
Copyright deposit 1893 (117.7)
Reno, Nevada.
Sheet #5
New York: Sanborn Map and
Publishing Company, 1899
Color printed map
Geography & Map Division
Copyright deposit (117.10)
Insurance Maps of
Williamsburg,
James City County, Virginia.
New York: Sanborn Map
Company, 1910
Color printed map
Geography & Map Division
Copyright deposit, 1910 (117.11)
Insurance Maps of Albia, Iowa
New York: Sanborn Map
Company, 1910
Color printed map
Geography & Map Division
Copyright deposit, 1910 (117.9)
Insurance Map of Los Angeles, California
New York: Sanborn Map Company, 1919
Geography & Map Division
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The O.K. Corral, where the notorious gunfight between the Earp
brothers and Doc Holliday versus the Clanton gang took place October
26, 1881, is shown (between 3rd and 4th Streets, bounded by Fremont
on the north and Allen on the south) in this 1886 fire insurance
map of Tombstone, Arizona.
This map is one of over 700,000 fire insurance map sheets produced
by the Sanborn Map Company for more than twelve thousand American
cities and towns from the 1870s until the 1950s. These maps were
prepared primarily to assist insurance underwriters in determining
the risk involved in insuring individual properties.
During the first half of the nineteenth century, most fire insurance
companies were small and based in a single city. Consequently,
the underwriters could themselves examine properties they were
about to insure. However, as insurance companies became larger
and expanded their coverage to numerous cities, a mapping industry
developed to support this need. The Sanborn Map Company of New
York eventually came to dominate the insurance mapping business.
As the Tombstone map illustrates, fire insurance maps provide
a block-by-block inventory of the buildings in the built-up or
congested parts of towns. The outline or footprint of each building
is indicated, and the buildings are color coded to show the construction
material (pink for brick; yellow for wood; brown for adobe). Numbers
inside the lower right corner of each building indicate how many
stories the building had, while the numbers outside the building
on the street front refer to the street addresses, allowing researchers
to correlate these locations with census records and city directories.
Individual dwellings are marked with "D" or "Dwg," but the residents
or owners are not identified. Factories, businesses (such as hotels,
saloons, liveries), churches, schools, and other public buildings
(city hall, assay office, library) are labeled by name.
Today, fire insurance maps are used for a wide variety of research
purposes including genealogy, urban history and geography, historical
preservation, and environmental studies. The Library accumulated
its unsurpassed collection of fire insurance maps primarily through
copyright deposit. In addition, the Bureau of the Census transferred
a set of maps updated with pasted-on corrections through to the
mid-1950s to the Library of Congress in 1967.
Another typical example is the 1919 map of a portion of the Hollywood-Colegrove
district of Los Angeles showing the Douglas Fairbank Pictures
Corporation Studio. While most of the building in the complex,
which are devoted to stages, dressing rooms, wardrobe, scene printing,
property storage, and projection, are constructed of wood ( indicated
by the color yellow), the archives building is the most substantially
constructed building, being made of reinforced concrete (indicated
by the brown color).
Fire insurance maps, prepared for underwriters, provide block-by-block
inventories of individual buildings for more than 12,000 cities
and towns from the 1870s to the 1950s. A typical example is this
1893 coverage of Pittsburgh, which was the capital of the world's
steel production. Native coke and coal, resources found in abundance
in western Pennsylvania, were essential to the production of steel.
This map shows the precise layout of the Carnegie and Black Diamond
Steel mills on the south side of the city, as well as the close
proximity of workers' homes as indicated by the letter "D" for
dwelling.
The Sanborn Fire Insurance map for Reno, Nevada, dated April
1899, shows the commercial center of the city, including the railroad
tracks and train station, several hotels, and a variety of businesses,
most of which were constructed of brick, which is indicated by
their pink coloring. The lower right corner shows the evolving
ethnic neighborhood of "China Town," located near the Truckee
River. The buildings labeled "Female Boarding" were legal houses
of prostitution.
Another example is this sheet from the 1910 coverage for Williamsburg,
Virginia. It focuses on Bruton Parish Church, the city hall, and
the powder magazine, all along Duke of Gloucester Street, constituting
the core of the historic restoration initiated by the Colonial
Williamsburg Foundation, which is celebrating its seventieth anniversary
this year. These maps document the former colonial Virginia capital
at the beginning of the twentieth century, just before this major
restoration began.
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