From Fire Hazards to Family Trees The Sanborn Fire Insurance Maps

Created for US insurance firms during a period of devastating fires across the 19th and 20th centuries, the Sanborn maps blaze with detail — shops, homes, churches, brothels, and opium dens were equally noted by the company’s cartographers. Tobiah Black explores the history and afterlife of these maps, which have been reclaimed by historians and genealogists seeking proof of the vanished past.

1905 Sanborn insurance map of San Francisco whose edges were damaged by the fires that arose in the wake of the 1906 earthquake — Source.

On the evening of April 4, 2024, dozens of people crowded into the Whitsett Room in Sierra Hall at California State University, Northridge (CSUN), for a symposium about a collection of fire insurance maps created by the Sanborn Map Company. The attendees were excited — several people greeted each other warmly, having only met on Zoom calls.

The age range of the attendees was wide. Undergraduates sat next to retirees. One family had brought their infant. A man sitting in front of me with a closely cropped white beard was posting videos he’d taken of CSUN’s Sanborn map collection to TikTok. The symposium was supposedly about “the ways in which Sanborn fire insurance maps have informed the work of artists, archivists and researchers”. But the message of the evening was simpler: people love these maps. To understand the Sanborn maps’ enduring appeal — many of which have been rescued, like CSUN’s collection, from the dumpster or basement or forgotten storage closet of a Sanborn office or customer — we must understand what they are.

Leave a Comment