Sanborn Map Company

Description

Plates 151-152 of the 1911 revision of the Sanborn Fire Insurance Atlas of Memphis. This neighborhood was in the midst of a change from a white middle class neighborhood to a black middle class neighborhood and business district, evidenced by the "negro tenements" and black churches, including Centenary Methodist Episcopal and Metropolitan Baptist Church. The area on plate 152 was razed in 1939 for the construction of William H. Foote Homes, a public housing project.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