Sanborn Maps
In 1888 the Sanborn Map and Publishing Company of New York surveyed Memphis, Tennessee, for the fire-insurance trade, drawing the city at fifty feet to the inch. Every building is shown to scale and color-coded for construction, with its height, use, occupant and hazards noted, alongside the hydrants, cisterns, water mains and steam fire engines that protected it. The volume opens with the surveyor’s report on a city of 70,000 people and a key map of the whole survey, then covers Memphis in thirty-two double-page sheets: the cotton warehouses, compresses and wharves along the Mississippi bluff, Front and Main Streets, Court Square and the wholesale blocks, the rail yards along the Wolf River, Beale and Vance Streets, and the residential additions spreading east.This Exile Books edition is an unabridged facsimile republication of the 1888 Memphis survey, reproduced complete and in full color from the copy held by the Geography and Map Division of the Library of Congress: the report and index, the key map and all thirty-two numbered sheets, each double-page plate laid out as a two-page spread.
