Though time travel isn’t a reality, opening a volume of Sanborn Insurance Maps and exploring the pages by hand is almost like jumping back in time. Between 1867-1970, the Sanborn Map Company charted cities and towns in the United States for fire insurers. Carefully drawn and printed, and then colored in by hand, these maps provided essential data about heights, construction materials, primary use, location of lot lines, and other features of commercial, industrial and residential buildings and addresses in populated areas. Sanborn Maps are great tools for understanding the growth the United States experienced over the span of a century, providing a clearer view of the evolution of the urban landscape. The newly-preserved volumes are invaluable to researchers because no other regional or city atlases mapped early twentieth-century Buffalo to such great extent.
In 2018, LP Ciminelli, Inc., a construction company based in Buffalo, New York, donated seven volumes of published and corrected 1916-1958 Sanborn Insurance Maps of the City of Buffalo to UB Libraries’ Map Collection. The maps were discolored with accumulations of dirt, soot, mold and stains and were in need of repair. Preservation Strategist Ronald Gaczewski led the restoration efforts to conserve these historical records of neighborhoods in the City of Buffalo. When the restoration process was completed, there was a remarkable improvement to the condition and appearance of these useful atlases.
Brian Morse, Cataloging Team Coordinator, then went to work, cataloging the maps and making them available for visitors to our Map Collection. Known for their distinctive coloration with layers of pasted-on changes to update communities, Sanborn Maps offer a wealth of information and remain valuable to researchers and scholars for tracking changes to cityscapes, examining what may exist below modern structures, validating facts uncovered during genealogical research, and gaining a deeper understanding about the history of businesses and residential homes.
Additional information about Sanborn Maps is available in the UB Libraries research guide, “Sanborn Fire Insurance Maps: UB Libraries Sanborn Maps Collections”: https://research.lib.buffalo.edu/sanborn-maps/ub