Sanborn maps of Campus
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Digitized Sanborn maps of Campus 1906-1929
Access Sanborn Fire Insurance maps of State College from the Digital Map drawer. Sanborn maps are extremely detailed plans of towns including building footprints and materials.
State College Sanborn Interactive Projects
The State College Change Through Time project took the initial steps of georeferencing and mosaicing the scanned maps. Information about the 4,000 buildings was extracted by hand using ArcGIS Desktop. Historical photographs from Penn State’s Eberly Family Special Collections Library were linked to individual buildings for each time-period where available to give context to the map and to also make these resources geographically discoverable. Advertisements for local businesses were harvested from historical publications and linked to the buildings that businesses once occupied. When brought together in this map series, these resources paint an interactive and vivid picture of what campus and town were like, and the dynamic growth that Penn State and State College experienced during the early part of the 20th Century. These maps also provide data about campus and town in geographic context that can be repurposed for other research goals.
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State College Land Use Change Through Time with Sanborn Fire Insurance Maps
Discover how State College and Penn State changed over 23 years using these maps. -
Mapping Historical People and Places
Data fusion is a contemporary idea that multiple data sources can be combined to create more complete, accurate or useful information. The value of data fusion applies to historical data as well as modern, although it is rarely applied with a historical focus. In this project, we demonstrate the fusion of two highly detailed historical datasets to produce spatially-explicit demographic maps of the community of State College, PA for two time-periods (1920 and 1930).
Historical spatial data came from building footprints digitized off of Sanborn Fire Insurance Maps, while the demographic information came from manuscript U.S. Census records accessible through Ancestry.com (library-edition), and digitized Penn State student directories.