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Sanborn Fire Insurance Maps · Library of Congress / Indiana State Library
North Liberty's Sanborn run is short, complete and exactly dated: three surveys — 1909, 1917 and 1929 — listed identically by the Indiana State Library's Sanborn list for St. Joseph County and by the Library of Congress, which holds the sheets as digitized images. For a town this size, three surveys across twenty years is the full working record, and the National Register nomination for the Commercial Historic District (2014) already mines it as one: the 1909 sheet locates the town hall and 'lock up' and the fire department in a one-story frame building southeast of the Worster Building block; by 1917 those buildings were razed, a small jail built on the site, and the building on the block read as fire department, water works and city hall; by 1929 it housed the post office as well. The same sheets fix the district's bakery expansion (between 1909 and 1917) and identify the town's only printing establishment, in 1909 and 1917 alike. No Sanborn survey after 1929 was made of North Liberty — the run's end is itself a measure: the town's insurable core stopped changing fast enough to resurvey, on the eve of the Depression.