Sanborn fire insurance maps provide a colorful glimpse at the commercial life of towns like Selinsgrove at the turn of the twentieth century. The Sanborn Company produced the maps for insurance companies to determine risk from fire for public, private, and commercial structures.
Here’s an example from downtown Selinsgrove. The sliding image below combines the Sanborn maps of the first block of South Market Street in 1885 and 1913.
Details emerge from a comparison of the maps. The addition of a telegraph office. The continuity of a drug store and a bank. The tobacco shop-turned-hotel. Studying the maps offers dozens of insights into the small, everyday details of the past.
The Library of Congress says:
During the past century the Sanborn Map Company has published maps and atlases of more than twelve thousand United States towns and cities, issued in some seven hundred thousand separate sheets, and yet the name Sanborn is known to but a small number of American map users. This anomalous situation has persisted because Sanborn’s specialized maps were prepared for the exclusive use of fire insurance companies and underwriters.
As Selinsgrove grew, the Sanborn maps kept pace. The first available edition for the town, from 1885, contained two maps of the Market Street corridor. By the last edition, in 1921, the set contained 14 maps, stretching from south of Sassafras Street northward to Shamokin Dam and east to west from the Isle of Que to Susquehanna University. The last set shows a pig pen on Blackberry Alley, a slaughterhouse and rendering shed on Orange Street, and ice bins along Penn’s Creek.
