Consider a map that permits you to see what your community gave the impression of a century in the past in immense element. What you’re considering of is almost certainly very similar to the fireplace insurance coverage maps constituted of the 1860s to the Nineteen Seventies for insurance coverage corporations to spot attainable hearth dangers.
Steadily known as Sanborn maps, after the Sanborn Map Co. that produced them, hearth insurance coverage maps had been created for each and every town in the USA with a inhabitants more than 1,000 folks. Over a century, greater than 50,000 editions of those maps had been produced, comprising over 700,000 map sheets – a lot of which were scanned and are publicly available throughout the Library of Congress.
1917 Sanborn map of The Hill on the College of Tennessee, Knoxville.
Library of Congress
Genealogists, historical preservationists, historians and concrete planners often use those maps to grasp previous city landscapes. However as a crucial cartographer involved in how maps form how folks perceive the sector, I see those maps otherwise.
Hearth insurance coverage maps provide extra than simply detailed insights into how neighborhoods regarded a long time in the past. Desiring to show a benefit, insurers sought to attenuate the volume of chance they underwrote or charged upper premiums to account for chance. Those maps supply necessary clues into how insurance coverage corporations understood how chance used to be allotted throughout towns, revealing expensive biases.
Mapping hearth chance
Ahead of zoning and land-use making plans, American towns continuously combined commercial, industrial and home constructions in the similar block. Insurance coverage brokers used the immense element of fireplace insurance coverage maps to decide whether or not a belongings used to be too dangerous to underwrite, frequently weighing the demographics of the neighborhoods with the flammability of the constructions locally.
Key to decoding the Sanborn maps.
Library of Congress
For instance, an Atlanta community referred to as Lightning used to be a Black, working-class district composed of a mix of rail yards, noxious industries and apartments in 1911. The community used to be additionally an immense hearth danger. Atlanta’s number one trash incinerator stood not up to 150 toes from two large herbal gasoline garage tanks, whilst two gasoline processing vegetation manufactured specialised fuels simply toes from houses.
Underwriters would use knowledge from hearth insurance coverage maps to grasp the native panorama. In those maps, colours correspond to the construction’s development subject material: red signifies brick, whilst yellow signifies picket. Lightning used to be essentially constituted of picket, putting all the community in danger if a hearth broke out.
Hearth insurance coverage maps and discrimination
On the identical time, hearth insurance coverage maps additionally spotlight the social panorama of the community.
Many constructions within the Lightning hearth insurance coverage map are categorized “F.B.,” which stands for “female boarding,” a euphemism for brothels. Whilst brothels weren’t a hearth chance themselves, this code indicated the alleged ethical danger of an area, or the possibility that belongings homeowners would permit riskier actions to happen on their belongings that might value insurers extra.
1911 Sanborn map of the Lightning community of Atlanta, Ga. It’s now Mercedes-Benz Stadium, house to the Atlanta Falcons of the Nationwide Soccer League and the Atlanta United FC of Primary League Football.
Library of Congress
From this one map, an underwriter may just briefly see that Lightning used to be an especially dangerous position to insure. Along side disinvestment from hearth insurers, marginalized communities like Lightning additionally skilled different types of systemic discrimination. Students have documented racial discrimination in automobile, existence and medical insurance underwriting.
Certainly, within the Nineteen Seventies, a lot of Lightning used to be bought below the specter of eminent area – the criminal procedure by which the federal government takes possession of personal land for public use – to build the Georgia Dome, now the web page of Mercedes-Benz Stadium.
Even supposing hearth insurance coverage maps are now not used within the insurance coverage trade, they supply researchers a method of seeing how discrimination in hearth insurance coverage and concrete making plans manifested in the USA all through the 20 th century.
