Fire insurance maps reveal a lot about the industrial history of cities and towns of any size. Sanborn fire insurance maps of a particular Mississippi Delta town in 1925 reveal an economy based around the harvesting, refining, and transportation of cotton. These maps also hint at the life and work of the Black community in the Delta that made this economy possible, as well as some of the many achievements of that town’s community over the 20th century.
The production of distilled spirits, especially whiskey, has been an economic asset of the United States since the earliest days of the republic. Battles, sometimes literally as in the case of the Whiskey Rebellion, erupted at times over how to regulate and tax distillers. Over the course of the 19th century, Congress acted and other industries stepped in to help with the regulation, leading to maps of whiskey production elements such as bonded warehouses, which appear prominently on some Sanborn fire insurance maps.
Sanborn Map Company fire insurance surveyors successfully mapped many thousands of cities and towns across North America, but they were often viewed with suspicion by locals and they were not granted access to every building they sought to map. This post describes what happened when they were refused, and the creative ways they could sometimes get around property owners’ reservations about their work.
