Initially created to estimate fire insurance risks, the company's maps are frequently used for historical research, and for preservation and restoration efforts.
Black and white maps of cities and towns from 13 states (California, DC, Florida, Illinois, Maryland, Massachusetts, Michigan, New York, New Jersey, North Carolina, PA, Virginia, and Washington.) Select the state, city and date. Use the Philadelphia Sanborn Index finding aid below to find the volume and sheet number needed as there is no geographic discover tool in the product.
Provides digital access to thousands of large-scale maps of American towns and cities, searchable by address and GPS coordinates. Sanborn® fire insurance maps are the most frequently consulted maps in libraries. The maps chart the growth and development of thousands of America towns and cities across a century. Because of this scope, urban specialists, social historians, architects, geographers, genealogists, local historians, and others will find the maps a valuable tool. ProQuest® Sanborn Maps Geo Edition™ allows for increased discovery and greater ease of use by making maps searchable by address and location. Examining temporal (time) changes is made even easier with tools that layer maps from different years on top of each other and over modern street, satellite, and hybrid layers via a Google™ map interface.
Interactive webmap showing Sanborn Fire Insurance maps of Philadelphia and surrounding counties. Included are the Free Library of Philadelphia's holdings of Hexamer Insurance maps and Sanborns. Using this webmap will help you select the correct volume and locate the sheet.
Interactive webmap showing Sanborn maps of Pittsburgh and Allegheny County. Using this webmap will help you select the correct volume and locate the sheet.
Interactive webmap showing Sanborn maps of Luzerne and Lackawanna counties. Using this webmap will help you tos elect the correct volume and locate the sheet.
Sanborn Fire Insurance maps of cities and towns in the Lehigh Valley. Red boundaries show the township boundaries where Sanborn maps were made. They do not show the extent of the maps. To view the maps, follow the link to the Penn State Digital collection, and view the index.
Search by state or town name. Not all maps have been scanned and added to this online collection. They are adding maps slowly. Consult the checklist below if you can't find what you are looking for.
The Sanborn Fire Insurance Maps Online Checklist provides a searchable database of the fire insurance maps published by the Sanborn Map Company housed in the collections of the Geography and Map Division. The online checklist is based upon the Library's 1981 publication Fire Insurance Maps in the Library of Congress and will be continually updated to reflect new acquisitions. The online checklist also contains links to existing digital images from our collection and will be updated as new images are added.
Find other resources for Pennsylvania Sanborn maps. By Bill Hunt and Evelyn L. Woodruff, revised by Philip Hoehn [UC Berkeley Library, Earth Sciences & Map Library]