Sanborn Maps
Facsimile of the 1919 Sanborn fire-insurance atlas of Newport News, Virginia, reproduced in full color from the Library of Congress copy. It covers the whole city of 70,000 people, from the shipbuilding and dry-dock yard and the Chesapeake & Ohio coal piers on the James River, through the stores, hotels and theatres of Washington Avenue and the Army warehouses of the Port of Embarkation, to the residential avenues out to Salters Creek, the East End in Elizabeth City County and Camp Stuart on Hampton Roads.The forty-two numbered sheets, opening with the key map, work block by block from the stores, banks, hotels and theatres along Washington Avenue, Twenty-fifth Street, Huntington Avenue, West Avenue and Jefferson Avenue - the County Court House and Jail, the City Hall, the Post Office, the U. S. Custom House, the Academy of Music, the Olympic, Stuart and Ivy Avenue theatres, the Imperial and Palace picture shows, the Elks’, Masonic and Moose halls, the Y. M. C. A., the Y. W. C. A. Hostess House, the American Red Cross headquarters, the War Camp Community Club, the Hotel Central, Grafton, Huntington and Newport, the Commercial, Exchange, Lexington, Richmond, Royal, Senate and Victoria hotels and the Sailors’ Home - through the Newport News Shipbuilding and Dry Dock Company’s dry docks, piers and foundries, the Chesapeake and Ohio piers, elevators, freight houses, car-float ferry docks and yards, the Newport News and Pocahontas coal company’s car shops, the Hampton Roads and Marine repair yards, the Southern Shipyard, the Old Dominion Land Company’s Pier A and steamship freight house, the Chesapeake Ferry waiting room, the Atlantic Aeronautical Station, the Port of Embarkation headquarters, barracks, Quartermaster warehouses and Government Warehouse No. 25, the gas plant and light and water works, the Distilled Ice and Virginia Food Products plants, the Water Front and Newport News lumber yards and planing mills, the Armour, Swift and Morris meat houses and the Standard Oil and Texas Company depots, to the Riverside, St. Francis, Elizabeth Buxton and Whittaker Memorial hospitals, the Walter Reed High School, the John Marshall, Stonewall Jackson, Thomas Jefferson, George Washington and Booker T. Washington schools, St. Vincent’s Boys Academy, the Virginia State School for Colored Deaf and Blind Children, St. Vincent’s, St. Paul’s, Grace Episcopal, First Baptist and Trinity Lutheran churches and the Adath Jeshurun Synagogue, Horwitz Ball Park and the Camp Stuart grounds, and the residential avenues up to Salters Creek, the East End and the Hampton Roads shore.In January 1919 the Sanborn Map Company of New York surveyed Newport News for the fire-insurance trade, drawing the business district at fifty feet to the inch and the outlying streets, the shipyard and the railway terminal at one hundred feet to the inch; an additional sheet for the Small Boat Harbor followed in June 1920. Every building is shown to scale and color-coded for construction (yellow for frame, pink for brick, blue for stone), with heights, uses, windows, party walls, hydrants, water mains and fire stations all marked. The index lists every street and every named business, church, school, hotel, mill and works with the sheet it appears on, and the key map places the colored sheet grid over the whole city.This Exile Books edition is an unabridged facsimile republication of the atlas: the combined title and index sheet and all forty-two numbered map sheets, the first of them the key map, together with the additional sheet 43 issued in June 1920, printed at 8.5 x 11 inches on premium color paper. Ideal for local historians, genealogists, architects, preservationists and anyone tracing a Newport News address back to 1919.
