Sanborn Map Company

Description

This is a Sanborn fire insurance map showing the the areas bound by 17th Avenue, 14th Avenue, Church St., and Cedar (Charlotte Ave.) in Nashville, Tenn. [Vol. 1 Page 19 and 20 of 1914 series, rev. 1931] It includes churches, apartments and businesses. Filling and service stations, negro tenements, a playground, a drug store, the Bethlehem Center Training School and gymnasium, the Capers Memorial Church, and the Biggins Commercial College are all denoted. Much of the area on Plate 19 shows the contemporary area of the location of the old state prison, remnants include prison alley. Details include outlines of each building, the location of windows and doors, property boundaries, firewalls, types of building materials used, heat sources, light sources and electric, locations of fire hydrants, location of water and gas mains, etc.Daniel Alfred Sanborn, a civil engineer and surveyor, began working on fire insurance maps in the 1860s and his company soon became one of the largest and most successful American map companies. Sanborn's first work mapping cities for insurance purposes began in Tennessee when Aetna Insurance hired him to survey a few towns across the state, however none of these earliest examples are known to exist today (Ristow, Walter W. "United States Fire Insurance and Underwriters Maps· 1852—1968." The Quarterly Journal of the Library of Congress 25, no. 3 (1968): 194-218." Sanborn maps were originally created to estimate fire insurance risks. Insurance companies would decide how much insurance, if any, was to be offered to a customer solely...

Record Contributed By

Tennessee State Library & Archives

Record Harvested From

Digital Library of Tennessee