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Sanborn Fire Insurance Map of Nashville, Tenn. (1897, rev. 1911)

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@ Tennessee State Library & Archives

Sanborn Map Company

Description

Plates 250-251 of Sanborn Fire Insurance map show the Central Asylum for the Insane, Tennessee Industrial School, City View Sanitarium, and the city water works. The insane asylum grounds include greenhouses, a fish pond, laundry, carpentry shop, and a "Negro ward." The main building is divided into male and female wards. The Tennessee Industrial School includes a wagon shop, vocational buildings, dormitories, a library, dining rooms, a hospital, a girls department and an auditorium."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 through the use of a Sanborn map. Today, the maps are frequently used for historical research and for preservation and restoration purposes.

Record Contributed By

Tennessee State Library & Archives

Record Harvested From

Digital Library of Tennessee