These valuation maps are great for prototype modeling. The Sanborn Company is now owned by ERD and PRoQuest has digitized all 660,000 maps covering 12,000 cities and towns. Some states apparently have bought a license from ProQuest as have their state universities. I don’t know which ones.
Have any of you been successful at ordering copies for specific locations from ERD or accessing the digital maps via the web. I live in Tennessee, but am trying to access maps for the Youngstown, OH - Sharon, PA area, preferably without having to sell my firstborn for the $$ and who is not at all keen on the idea.
I want to echo what Terry has said about Sanborn maps being a great asset for modeling and for historical research. I call your attention to the 1975 photo below. On the left is Mrs. Era Standefer, a retired history teacher from Commerce, TEXAS. She was also an adjunct history professor at East Texas State University for a time after her retirement from the public schools. Era is holding a Cotton Belt locomotive medallion, like the ones that used to adorn the L1 Northerns. On the right is Era’s husband, C. W. “Red” Standefer, a retired Cotton Belt Engineer. Red is holding a steam locomotive bell. On the table behind them are various books detailing railroad history. And on the wall is a Sanborn Map of Commerce, TEXAS. These two people treasured and preserved railroad history. There is no doubt in this writers view that the Sanborn map was an important historical asset to the Standefer’s over 30 years ago.
The Sanborn maps were used by the insurance industry for many many years. Fire underwriters and other fire standard making organizations used the information from these maps to rate the fire protection not only of whole towns and cities but also of individual industries and buildings. Large property insurance companies would train their engineers how to survey a property and how to make accurate scale drawings showing plot plans and elevations. Some of the key exposures and fire hazards that a property underwriter would need to evaluate were type of construction, building area and height including windows and doors, occupancy by area and ceiling height, location of water sources, fire mains and size, hydrants and hose houses, yard sectional valves, fire pumps and pump houses, transformers, boiler houses and size of boilers, access roads and all railroad track, distance to all exposure buildings and outside storage such as oil tanks, gas tanks, propane tanks, wood, coal, lumber and wood chip piles. In other words these plans include everything you ever wanted to know about an industry or structure to scratch build it. In theory, with these maps you could accurately scratch build a whole town or city. Before the A-Bomb was dropped ending WWII, the OSS used maps similar to these to plan fire bomb raids. The maps showed the location of major fire mains and fire walls at enemy war plants which could be breached with high explosives prior to dropping incendiary bombs. ( Re: " Fire and The Air War" published in 1946 by the National Fire Protection Association) I model the area around Weed California and have these maps for the entire Weed Lumber Company on various dates. They show the location of the SP Wye, the interchance between the Siskiyou branch and the Cascade branch, the Weed Station, all sidings and the Weed steam helper locomotive sheds and servicing facility all in scale and with elevations Since I worked as an insurance company fire protection engineer for many years and later as a risk manager
I contacted Sanborn in the past just as those maps were in the process of being digitized about buying sets of the maps and it is very expensive. They are geared towards selling individual pages to people who are interested in seeing the history of their own property. They did say they could probably give me a volume discount, but it would still have been hundreds of dollars just for one large city.
As you mentioned, any large state university will likely have the maps for the state. I have Sanborn maps from many cities from the state of Michigan that I accessed from the Michigan State University library in East Lansing. MSU happens to have paid for the license to access maps from the state of Michigan only. For you a weekend road trip appears in order. Of course call ahead and verify the library has the maps and you can login as a guest to access the maps. Bring a flash drive to store the files as the computers may not have a DVD or CD burner.
If you do go to a university library, note that you cannot simply copy files from a server hard drive to a disk. You must download each file, open it, and “save as” to a disk. (Maybe with the Mozilla Firefox download manager, you may be able to save some of those steps.) Anyway, give yourself a fair amount of time. For example, the 1952 Grand Rapids, Michigan set has about 500 pages and it took me a couple of hours to get that all downloaded. I would imagine Youngstown is about the same.
I work for a large Texas community college. Our library subscribes to the Texas Sanborn maps. They are a very interesting source of prototype information.
Our local public library has them as well; I know some n scalers who obtained the maps to downtown Bryan on a CD; they took the CD to a blueprint printer, and for about $50; they got n scale printouts of downtown Bryan, TX.
Check public libraries in the OH PA area near the area you want to model. Our local library (Kansas City, Missouri) has Sanborn maps for parts of Kansas and Missouri on the web, and the only cost is obtaining a library card (It is available only to Kansas and Missouri residents, however.) But perhaps if you find a library with online access available, they might provide access in return for a donation. (Probably much cheaper than ERDs prices.) In any case, good luck.
