The Sanborn run, measured: five editions, on film, unopened

1886–1929

The fire-insurance map is the most truthful portrait a small town ever sat for, and New Carlisle sat five times: the Sanborn Map Company's editions for this town run 1886, 1893, 1899, 1907 and 1929 — a forty-three-year run of footprint-by-footprint record, standing on microfilm at the Indiana State Library, its holdings list read first-hand for the sources leg. Against that positive record the negative prints at its measured strength: the Library of Congress's digitized Sanborn collection was searched for New Carlisle and returned no New Carlisle item — a tested absence in that collection's search, printed by the sources leg itself with the care the distinction deserves, since the same search returns its Rushvilles and Huntertowns freely. The run therefore prints at combined carrier strength, in the form the pass was briefed to use: no LOC item; the State Library's film carries editions 1886–1929. What those sheets would settle is half the built record's open questions — the district's building-by-building footprints and materials, the elevator succession the businesses leg wants, the Michigan Street row's true width at five dated moments — which is why the sources leg named the Sanborns the settler class for the district's interior questions, and why the sheet-level read stands banked as GAP-NC6-MAPS-2: the film itself at the State Library is the settler, with the pre-1923 editions' circulation in digitized form through the state university collections as the second route to the same sheets that the sources leg recorded. A run measured is not a run read; this section prints the measurement whole and the reading as owed.

Sources

2. Library of Congress, digitized Sanborn maps collection — the search and its tested absence.