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The most exact maps ever made of Fort Wayne were drawn for fire insurance companies. The Sanborn Map Company of New York sent its surveyors through American cities to record, at fifty feet to the inch, what an underwriter needed to price a policy: every building's footprint, its construction — frame, brick, stone, told by the color of the lithograph — its height, its use, its boilers and hazards, the width of streets and the size of water mains. Pasted together, the Fort Wayne volumes are a building census drawn to scale, kept current for decades by correction slips pasted over the sheets as the city changed.
The Library of Congress documents the Fort Wayne run in its digital Sanborn collection. It opens in March 1885 with seventeen sheets. The 1890 edition runs to forty-three sheets, bound; the 1902 edition to 124 sheets. In 1906 Sanborn issued a single-sheet map of the central business district. The 1918 edition's first volume carries 110 sheets and a map of the congested district; its companion second volume followed in 1919, and both volumes were then corrected forward — the Library's copies of volume 1A run "1918–February 1951" in sixty-seven sheets, and volume 2 was likewise updated to March 1951. The Allen County Public Library's Genealogy Center holds two multi-volume sets of the original 1918–1919 editions — pages twenty-one by twenty-five inches at the same fifty-feet-to-the-inch scale — whose paste-over updates carry the record into the early and middle 1950s. Sanborn's surveyors worked the county's smaller towns as well: editions exist for Arcola, Huntertown, Monroeville, New Haven, and Woodburn. Statewide, the Indiana Spatial Data Portal notes, Sanborn produced Indiana maps from 1883 to 1966, all drawn at the same 1:600 scale.
The maps are free. The Library of Congress serves the Fort Wayne editions in its Sanborn Maps collection, and the Indiana Spatial Data Portal holds scanned GeoTIFF editions gathered with Historical Information Gatherers Inc. On rights: all Sanborn maps produced by 1925 are in the public domain, while an exclusive-rights claim by Environmental Data Resources attaches to post-1924 material — so the nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century sheets can be reused outright, and the pasted corrections of the 1930s–1950s are linked and read at the Library rather than republished. For this history the Sanborn run has done quiet work everywhere: the Architecture, Business, and Neighborhoods chapters walked it sheet by sheet, because for a storefront's footprint, a factory's construction, or a saloon's exact corner in 1902, there is no better witness.
Sources: Library of Congress, Sanborn Maps collection, Fort Wayne items sanborn02334_001 (1885, 17 sheets), _002 (1890, 43 sheets), _003 (1902, 124 sheets), _004 (1906, 1 sheet), _005 (1918 vol. 1, 110 sheets), _008 (1918–Feb. 1951, vol. 1A, 67 sheets); ACGSI, Sanborn maps of Allen County page (acgsi.org), index to the Library of Congress editions including vol. 2, 1919–Mar. 1951, and the union list of Allen County towns mapped; History Center, Notes & Queries (Mar. 26, 2013), on the Genealogy Center's Sanborn sets and paste-over updates; Indiana Spatial Data Portal, Indiana Sanborn maps collection, on the 1883–1966 Indiana run, the 1:600 scale, and the public-domain position.