Sanborn Maps
In 1888 the Sanborn Map & Publishing Co. of New York surveyed Nashville for the fire-insurance trade, drawing the city at fifty feet to the inch across forty large double-page sheets. Every building is shown to scale and colour-coded for construction, with its height, use, street number and hazards noted, together with the hydrants, water mains, steam boilers and fire walls that the underwriters needed to know.The atlas opens on a report and index of every street and named building, then a key map of the whole city, and works block by block through the wholesale houses and warehouses along the Cumberland River wharf, the Public Square, Market Street and Broad Street, the churches, colleges and hospitals on the hills, the tobacco and cotton warehouses, and the mills, foundries and depots along the railroads. The surveyors’ own report puts the population at 75,000, with a paid fire department of forty-six men, four Ahrens steamers and 350 hydrants fed from the new Cumberland River water works.This Exile Books edition reproduces the volume complete and in full colour: the report and index sheet, the key map and all forty numbered double-page sheets, each laid out as a two-page spread. Printed at 8.5 x 11 inches on heavy colour stock, it is a working reference for historians, genealogists, architects, preservationists and anyone tracing a Nashville address back to the 1880s.
