Sanborn Fire Insurance Maps (of US towns from 1867 to 1970)

For those of you not familiar with them, the Sanborn Map Company (started in 1867 as the D. A. Sanborn National Insurance Diagram Bureau & which name changed over time) produced U.S. town maps for fire insurance purposes. The maps showed buildings in the towns, streets, etc. Depending on the year of map production, the town and other factors, some maps showed substantial detail such as the number of stories, construction information (wood, brick, adobe…), occupants (some riskier for fire than others, a foundry versus a grocer, say), whether the commercial buildings had electric or gas lights, where water mains were located and the like. Although originally made for fire insurance purposes, they have found current use for checking on environmental risks of land and buildings today by showing, for example, where oil depots, gas stations, dry cleaners, foundries and other environmentally risky companies might have been located and, therefore, where there might be contaminated soil risk. Typically, there is an first page with general information and an index thereon to maps for the town. Galena, Illinois (see below) might have 7 or 8 pages of maps, for example.

Without going too much into detail here are links to further information if you're interested…

-- Sanborn maps and history via Environmental Data Resources (& other pages here at edrnet.com ):

http://www.edrnet.com/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=108&...

-- Sanborn Map Company (I don’t know the relationship, if any, between this company and the original Sanborn firm):

http://www.sanborn.com/

-- Wikipedia, of course (see links at bottom to various colleges/universities for some Sanborn maps):

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sanborn_Maps

-- Digital Sanborn maps (via ProQuest, LLC):

http://sanborn.umi.com/

It appears that one needs a password account to navigate the above and, offhand, I didn’t see how to go about getting one.

and help in navigating Sanborn maps:

http://sanborn.umi.com/HelpFiles/info.html

-- Information via University of Virginia Library:

http://fisher.lib.virginia.edu/collections/maps/sanborn_old/web/umiguide.html

poke around on this site’s other links…

-- Some Sanborn maps along with sundry interesting historic maps available at this site:

http://www.davidrumsey.com/

Another source of these maps are colleges, universities, probably some town and cities have them for that town or city.

I’m particularly interested in Galena (an old, quaint, architecturally very interesting old lead mining town in northwest Illinois and Chicago. I found Illinois town maps (just a few of many for Chicago) via my local community college library by getting their library card (I pay real estate taxes to them) and accessing online databases for which they provide free access.

A digital version for various Utah cities is available from the University of Utah: http://preview.tinyurl.com/4lt3eu. The ones online are those out of copyright (1922 and before) with presumably more available in-person.

As a follow up on the above... Atlantic's CityLab has an article titled The Accidental Revelations of Sanborn Maps; How maps created for fire insurers show the evolution of cities. Interesting stuff.