The Sanborn run: the city surveyed for fire, 1885–1949

Six editions at the Library of Congress, two volumes kept current for thirty years

What these maps are. The Sanborn Company's fire-insurance maps were drawn for underwriters, not readers: at a scale of fifty feet to the inch — 1:600 — Sanborn's surveyors recorded nearly every building in the city, its construction material by color, its height, its use room by room in the industrial plants, the water mains and hydrants and fire-alarm boxes that priced a risk beside it. Kept current, they become the closest thing the nineteenth and early twentieth-century city has to a building-by-building census, and historians use them now for everything their makers never intended. The Indiana frame, from the Indiana Spatial Data Portal and IndianaView, is statewide: the company mapped Indiana places from 1883 to 1966, at a uniform 1:600, and the portal's archive holds the images — 11,517 in its count, of which 10,109 are public domain and 1,408 copyright-restricted, for 305 locations across 1886–1930 and after. The Sanborn Company designated Indiana University's Herman B Wells Library map collections as the repository for the original Indiana paper maps, digitized there with Historical Information Gatherers Inc.; IU's own account holds "a near-complete collection of Sanborn maps for the state of Indiana," the public-domain sheets digitized and downloadable. The rights rule the Fort Wayne file prints governs here too: sheets published before 1925 are public domain; later material carries restrictions — link to it, do not republish it.

South Bend's editions, as the holdings state them. The Indiana State Library's microfilm checklist of Indiana Sanborn maps gives the city's run: 1885, 1891, 1893, 1899, and the two-volume edition of 1917 — volume 1 and volume 2 — which the company then kept alive by paste-over correction slips, the checklist recording each volume in two corrected states, carried to 1944 and carried to 1949. The Library of Congress's digital collection holds the run as six items: May 1885, July 1891, December 1893, 1899, 1917, and 1949 — the last being the corrected-to-1949 state of the 1917 survey, not a new survey. No later South Bend edition followed: the city's Sanborn record ends in 1949, thirty-two years of paste-overs standing in for the new surveys the company no longer sold it. The per-edition sheet counts, which the Library of Congress's Sanborn database records for each item, were not pulled sheet by sheet and are named as an update task; the editions and their states above are as the two catalogs state them.

What the run documents. Read in sequence, the six editions are the industrial riverfront's biography at fifty feet to the inch. The 1885 sheets show the mill city on both races — the water-powered shops the river's dams fed; the 1891 and 1893 editions draw the wagon and plow works at their maturity, Studebaker's and Oliver's plants building by building; 1899 and 1917 record the conversion to the automobile-age factory, the rail sidings multiplied, the working-class districts — Polish west side, Hungarian south side — filled in street by street with their churches, halls and saloons individually lettered; and the corrected-to-1949 volumes carry the record through the Depression by paste-over, buildings razed and uses changed one glued slip at a time, until Studebaker's great plant — drawn in its full extent in the last corrected sheets — stood five years from the closing this history's Studebaker file tells. The run's working life continues in the present tense: the environmental profession reads these editions as its first evidence, and a certified Sanborn report for a site at 122 Western Avenue, hosted on the city's own document server, works from the 1885, 1891, 1893 and 1899 editions — the city filing its own consultants' readings of the fire maps as public record.

The county's other Sanborn towns, printed at boundary size: the Library of Congress holds Sanborn editions for Mishawaka of July 1891 and 1901 — the neighboring city's run, for its own build — and for New Carlisle of April 1893 and April 1899, the county's western railroad town drawn at the same survey scale.

Sources:

1. Indiana State Library, Indiana Sanborn Maps checklist (S–Z, the State Library's microfilm list) — South Bend: 1885, 1891, 1893, 1899; 1917 v. 1 and v. 2, each in corrected states to 1944 and to 1949.
2. Library of Congress, Sanborn Maps digital collection, as indexed — South Bend items: May 1885, July 1891, December 1893, 1899, 1917, 1949; Mishawaka items: July 1891, 1901; New Carlisle items: April 1893, April 1899; and the Library's fire-insurance-maps resource guide on the collection's records and sheet counts.
3. Indiana Spatial Data Portal / IndianaView — the Indiana Sanborn frame: production 1883–1966, 1:600, the image counts (11,517; 10,109 public domain, 1,408 restricted, 305 locations), the pre-1925 public-domain rule, and the Wells Library's designation as repository for the Indiana originals.
4. Indiana University Libraries, Indiana Sanborn Maps — the near-complete state collection and its public-domain digitization.
5. EDR certified Sanborn report, 122 Western Avenue, South Bend (city document server) — editions of 1885, 1891, 1893 and 1899 worked from.