From Fire Hazards to Family Trees: The Sanborn Fire Insurance Maps

I spend a lot of time looking at Sanborn maps: they are an extremely useful resource any time you research the history of an urban area in the U.S. Even when in a boring place where you think you are pretty damn sure on how the buildings around you came to be, those maps might have a surprise for you. Recently I was researching a neighborhood that included a home that was was surely built c. 1900 due to its style and materials. Yet it didn't appear on a Sanborn map until after 1950: it was just an empty lot before that. Still haven't figured out where it was moved from, but it was definitely moved.

If you live in a U.S. city that has them, look up the maps of your neighborhood. You'll probably learn some fun stuff, maybe answer some weird question you've always wondered.

Sanborn Maps was tied to Warren Buffett, where he once committed around a quarter of his partnership assets to it. Here is a Case Study for anyone interested: http://csinvesting.org/wp-content/uploads/2012/05/sanborn_ma...

Good accompaniment to another article I enjoyed earlier this year, on the history of fire in the US:

'All That Is Solid Bursts into Flame: Capitalism and Fire in the Nineteenth-Century United States'

https://doi.org/10.1093/pastj/gtad019

Great article! A searchable collection of the maps is in the Library of Congress:

https://www.loc.gov/collections/sanborn-maps/?searchType=adv...

The graphic design from the old Sanborn maps for the city name are really something.

The maps are beautiful.