The Sanborn Fire Insurance Maps

Where are all my history nerds? Raise your hands. This week is for you. I’m talking historic maps, digitized collections and crowd-sourced cartography projects. I KNOW!

I was so tickled when a Ready to Remodel student showed up to an Office Hours call a few months ago with so much fresh confidence derived from finding the Sanborn maps of her own property.  

Her local permitting office was willing to accept the map she found as proof of a grandfather in the structure that meant they were able to carry on with their plans for a WHOLE LOT LESS paperwork!  

Plus, turning up a historic resource had helped her feel confident in her interactions with her local building department and advocating for her remodel plan. This is what Discovery is all about!

I was delighted to hear her name check the Sanborn map collection, because it took me right back to my university days. 

What are the Sanborn Fire Insurance Maps?

Hi, I am a huge nerd, and I would spend a lot of time in the campus libraries. I actually made a project of visiting every single one of the dozens of specialist libraries on the UW campus. I also had a job shelving books part time in the Graduate School Library, right on library mall.

In its main space there was a collection of handbound Sanborn Fire Insurance maps for our region. They were big – like three feet tall by two feet wide – yellowed, heavy vellum paper, actual copies of the handmade books.

Sanborn Fire Insurance Maps are large-scale maps were created to help fire insurance agents determine the risk and hazard associated with a specific property.

The Sanborn company, founded by D.A. Sanborn in 1866, held a near-monopoly on these detailed plans for most of the 20th century. They contain a surprising amount of detail about a building’s size, shape, construction materials, and fire protection systems, all of which was meticulously recorded until the business began to decline in the 1960’s. The last new map was created in 1961.

Many of these maps have been digitized and they are used for all kinds of research projects. The Library of Congress has an impressive collection, as do some university and local libraries.

Understanding the Maps

The maps use a color-coding system to indicate construction material. You can expect to find your mid-century ranch predominantly yellow, which signifies a frame building (wooden construction).

If your home has brick, it may be pink-ish red or appear as a red outline with a yellow interior indicating brick veneer. Stone or concrete structures are blue.

And you’ll see details like tiny abbreviations and symbols noting  roof type, number of stories, the property’s occupancy (D for a residential dwelling ), and the presence of a detached garage, or, as they charmingly called it, an “auto house”.

How These Maps Can Help When Remodeling

Is the footprint of your house what it originally was? Or has it changed? Do you have some sort of local ordinance that says you’re not allowed to have a garage there…but it’s already there?

If you’re being prevented from repairing something in place, replacing an existing structure, or planning a change that will probably require a variance, these maps may provide just the historical context you need to get approval.

Exploration of these historical tools is all about empowering you.

By uncovering the original layout, construction, and existence of features like your detached garage or a kitchen pantry that may have long since been absorbed into a later renovation, you gain a deep understanding of your house’s DNA. 

And you build your internal cred as the expert on your house.

What makes you an expert on your own house?

The discovery process – getting that feeling of expertise – is personal and unique to you.

And I can’t tell you what the most important thing you’ll learn about your house will be in the end. It will be whatever makes you feel calm and confident as you talk to all the various people who are going to be involved in giving you quotes and bids and coming into your house to do work on it.

My best advice is to find an area where you are already confident in your personal or professional life and then extend out from that. 

So, you love maps…then the Sanborn Fire Insurance maps may be a key piece of your Discovery process.

Or you’re a film/tv buff. Dive into a couple of period movies or shows set in the 1960s just to run your eyes across some organically chosen sets and locations filled with authentic details from the year your house was built.

Maybe gossip is more your thing? Then, by all means, set about visiting all the long time residents on the block and ask them to spill the house-related tea.

Research doesn’t have to look like work. And it doesn’t have to be hard.  

It just has to help you amass knowledge to help you transform from an anxious homeowner into the genuine expert on your property. When you eventually talk to a contractor or an architect, your confidence helps you lead a timeless remodel that is right for your mid-century house and your modern life.

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Sanborn Map Resources

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Read the Full Episode Transcript

00:00

Today, I’m doing a deep dive into the Sanborn fire insurance map collection, the fact that it’s online and how you can use it to learn a surprising amount of information about what your house was like right after it was built. But also, I want to talk about why old maps, vintage movies, DIY remodeling guides and chatting with your elderly neighbors are all really valuable, actionable parts of the planning process for a mid-century homeowner, maybe even more valuable to you than a number of Pinterest boards.

00:30

One way or another, learning more about your house is never the wrong thing to do, and particularly when you’re planning a remodel, it may be the confidence boost, feeling like you’ve got some real expertise in your own home that will allow you to stand up for what’s right for the mid-century choices that are correct for your mid-century home.

00:49

Hey there. Welcome back to mid mod remodel. This is the show about updating MCM homes, helping you match a mid-century home to your modern life. I’m your host. Della Hansmann, architect and mid-century ranch enthusiast. You’re listening to Episode 2215 I’m going to get right into our topic in a moment here. But today’s episode is littered with references that you will want to follow up in the show notes.

01:11

Even if you’re listening to this while you walk your dog or do the dishes, come back around and check out all of the links you are going to hear about in this episode at mid mod, midwest.com/ 2215 so hello to my history nerds out there. If this is the reason you listen to the podcast, you’re going to enjoy this one. But I am also going to be talking about the bigger picture, the reasoning behind these little fun history deep dives and why it actually serves a purpose. If your goal is eventually to make changes to your mid-century house, you are moving yourself closer towards a remodel. You are building important, let’s call it the foundations of your remodel planning process by learning more about mid-century history in an episode like today’s.

01:57

Okay, this topic has been on my mind for a podcast since March, I’m looking at my notes. It was last March when one of my ready to remodel students showed up to our first Monday of the month architect Office Hours call with their latest home history discovery, and Cindy shared that she and her husband had found their home on a Sanborn fire insurance map online, and their city was going to accept this as proof of a grandfather in the structure, so she was wondering if other people would want to know about it.

Not really a this is more of a comment than a question, sort of a question, but really also part of the fun of our office hours calls is sometimes it’s people coming in with a problem and me giving my advice, other people sharing what they have to contribute on that topic, and other times, it’s just people helping each other out, passing along the shared knowledge that they have gained in their home research process.

02:49

So the Sanborn fire insurance maps online are an incredibly useful resource for very specific situations, and also just a lot of fun. I was delighted to hear her name check them, because it took me right back to my university days. Hi, I am a huge nerd, and I would spend a lot of time in the campus libraries. I actually made a project of visiting every single one. And I can’t remember now, but there were dozens. There were dozens of specialist libraries on the UW campus, engineering, math, I think my favorite was actually a sort of an old library that was almost dead but still existed. The collection still existed, and they still would open up the room.

03:26

I don’t think it was even staffed, but they would leave it unlocked certain days of the week on campus from the Home Economics Department, and it was just filled with like household cleaning manuals, but also a really amazing collection of knitting pattern books. Anyway, I also spend a huge amount of time, including having a job shelving books part time in the Graduate School Library, right on library mall, and in its main space, I think it was actually up on the second floor. They had a large books collection, and they had the hand bound sandboard fire insurance maps for our region.

04:02

They were big, like three feet tall by two feet wide, yellowed, heavy vellum paper, actual copies of the handmade books. They weren’t a printing and they were amazing, because you could flip through them and find the streets. I knew, the streets of campus, the campus buildings, the Capitol building, State Street and other parts of the area as they had been recorded as recently as the 19 I think the 1940s are the best that Madison, Wisconsin can do. So first, what are these?

04:32

The Sanborn maps themselves are large scale lithographed street plans at a scale of 50 feet to one inch on Oh, actually they are 21 inches by 25 inches sheets of paper, and they make these big, hefty books, which contain information about everything from the number of stories the buildings have to general information, such as the population, economy, prevailing wind direction at the time of recording in an area. The Sanborn company had a monopoly on Fire Insurance maps for the majority of the 20th century, but the business eventually declined. As a US insurance company stopped using maps for underwriting in the 1960s the last official map, the last new map was researched and created in 1961 that doesn’t mean that there’s a 1961 map for every area.

05:18

It was sort of as needed. New maps would be made for new areas as they were populated or changed. These are all digitized now, and you can visit them in the Library of Congress collections as long as, as long as that’s still a thing. And I’ll give a little more information at the end of the episode about how to what sort of information you can glean from a Sanborn map. How to Read one. I’ll share the link for where to go find that Library of Congress digitized collection, and you can go check out your area.

05:45

But I wanted to bring this to the second part of Cindy’s more comment than a question, which was the concept of grandfathering to grandfather in terms of construction, means that the building in question existed before a building code was written to govern it, and this is particularly relevant for us mid-century homeowners for a couple of reasons. One, because it’s important to note that our houses were presumably built to the highest necessary safety and insulation and electrical standard of their own time, but that does not mean they measure up to the standard of new building today.

06:17

This might mean where would it be most obvious in your kitchen, if you have an original mid-century kitchen, it probably has a light switch at the entry door, maybe a two way switch, maybe not. You probably have more than one door in your kitchen, and there’s probably only a light switch by one of them, and you probably have an outlet to plug things in, by the refrigerator, by the range, and maybe one or two other places. Whereas modern electrical code specifies that you need to have an electrical outlet at least every four feet of countertop along every horizontal four feet of countertop.

06:52

And there are specifications for how close it can be to the center line of a sink, and there are a bunch of different regulations that basically just come down to there’s a lot of plugs in a modern kitchen, and that’s this is for convenience. It’s officially for safety. It’s for safety because they don’t want you to be doing what you would do for convenience, what many of us with mid-century kitchens do for convenience, which is to plug a multi prong outlet into your kitchen, plug and then run cords all over to get all your countertop appliances properly plugged in.

07:20

It’s trying to prevent you from needing to do any sort of weird dangly cord things, because there’s always a duplex grounded outlet within if it’s every four feet, within two feet of wherever you are, two feet or closer to the center line of your appliance, there should be a plug for you to plug into. So if you live in a mid-century grandfathered kitchen. That does not mean anybody is going to knock on your door one day and count the number of outlets in your kitchen and then punish you for not having enough or make you change it.

07:49

It just means that if you were to go about making significant changes to your kitchen in the future, you would be required to bring it up to modern code, and sometimes you might choose to make an improvement to your home voluntarily, you might want to just rewire your kitchen, run a horizontal cut through all the drywall, and have electrician come in and put in more outlets for you. Maybe even run another circuit so that you’re less likely if you have elderly, senescent wiring, you might find that like running the microwave and the coffee maker and the blender all at the same time, trips the breaker, and then you’re making a trip down to the basement to flip it back up again in order to keep doing what you were doing in the kitchen.

08:29

Also you might find that in terms of lighting, accessibility, of stair tread, depth and height, there are other qualities of a mid-century house that were built to be a little more compact, a little bit more go at your own risk than modern construction allows for. So knowing whether something was grandfathered in the context of what Cindy was looking up about her home has to do with Are you dealing with an original structure?

08:58

Is the footprint of your house what it originally was, or do you have some sort of local ordinance that says you’re not allowed to have a garage there, but there already was one, so you’re not being prevented from repairing it in place, or you’re going to have to apply for a variance in order to get one there. That’s a topic that’s a little closer to fire insurance maps than kitchen outlets, although kitchen outlets can cause fire problems anyway. Let’s leave the generalized topic of grandfathering. And actually, I think I’m do a refresher episode on codes as they apply to your home, and what you as a homeowner might want to know about building codes as an entirely separate episode for another day.

09:34

But before we get deeper into the topic of the Sanborn fire insurance maps and what you might learn about your house from them or from other mapping research. I want to talk a little bit about the concept of why it’s actually very beneficial to your future hypothesized remodel to have some fun doing history deep dives just like this one. I’m going to borrow a bit from a much more recent pep talk I gave to the Ready to remodel program, the new cohort of student homeowners who are kicking off, or in some cases restarting, and re-energizing their existing home improvement plans with us in this current mid modern or Mod Squad.

10:10

And I would say that this kind of Episode The history of a specific type of fire insurance map, and the way you can do amazingly accessible historical research in this digital age from the comfort of your own home is part of the home discovery process, which is an essential element in creating a mid-century master plan. Ultimately, your master plan is what gets you going. It’s what gets you from wish lists and hypotheticals and some days into the project you’re going to do first and how that first project smoothly transitions you into the next phase and the phase after that, or how you can confidently take on a whole house remodel, budget for it, save for it, pay for it, execute it all at once, and know that you’re doing exactly the right things.

10:52

You have scaled the project precisely. It’s going to fit your budget, and it’s going to make your life better the way it’s supposed to. All of that comes from a master plan, but each of the 5d in the master plan process is equally essential to getting a good result, and discovery of your house is one of them.

11:09

The Master Plan method involves going through 5d named steps in order, roughly in order, and if you recall correctly, they are dream which is about setting your priorities, digging deeper into what really matters to you, figuring out what quality of your home, on an almost spiritual level, are missing from the house you have right now and then sitting in that feeling so that you’ve got your problems clearly in front of you, and when you go to solve them, you can create real world solutions that will really work to tailor the house to your life.

11:37

The second D is discover, and it’s somewhat about documentation. So it’s about making a floor plan, and it’s about photographs of the details and the materials and the spaces in your house for easy reference in the future. But I didn’t call this phase document.

11:51

I called it discovery, because what it’s ultimately about is getting familiar with your home. And then there’s the distill phase, which is all about setting the style for your home, creating your own mid-century style guide of materials, shapes, metals, stain colors, paint colors, types of fabric and upholstery, to plan a cohesive vision right from the start, so that when you get into the middle of decision making, you can easily respond to the millions of options and possibilities. You can focus and sift and winnow your way to the correct answer, simply for you, for your house, for your budget, without too much soul searching and too many late night internet rabbit holes.

12:25

Then after you finish those first three which kind of together form the pre design phase, there’s the draft phase, where you widen your horizons, you consider multiple possibilities, trying to surprise yourself with options to solve the three kinds of problems you dug up in the pre design phase, the problems of dream, those where your house isn’t living the way you want it, to the problems of discovery, where the house has a maintenance issue or a lingering mid-century health hazard, like lead paint.

12:54

Or the problems of distill your house is out of period, or the house is done up in a style that is more about the 80s than the time it was done. So draft is all about throwing spaghetti at the wall, opening up possibilities, solving multiple problems with one solution, and just trying different things out. And then finally, the last D in the five is develop, which is about seeing what sticks and refocusing from many options into the right options. I think of this as the Goldilocks phase, what’s too much for you, what’s too little for you, what’s the right amount of remodeling to take on in every period. So from those five DS mapping comes back to the discovery phase.

13:32

And like I say, I could have called this the document phase. That would have fit the alliteration just fine. But this isn’t just about recording what’s going on in your house to give you the raw materials for design thinking. That is, by the way, part of the documentation process is, hmm, okay, let’s put it this way. When I was a young architect, as a young designer, this was the part of the design process that I was trained was just about getting the necessary information about a house, sort of an audit.

14:01

I had a boss, lo these many years ago who had his own sense of style, so he didn’t really care about distilling the owner’s style at all, and he certainly his type of architecture. He was not interested in the owner’s preferences. So he was going to tell them what was right. He didn’t really want to know about their lifestyle. He wasn’t curious how many people lived in the household, or if they were intense cooks, or people who liked to order in every night, he was just going to look at their house and design the kitchen that was correct for the space.

14:28

His design process was about documenting maybe that was the only relevant design D you might be able to tell from the way that I’m describing this that that’s not a velocity design that I share. I’m not the kind of designer who thinks the only relevant information about a house are its dimensions and then my preferences for it. I am a high information designer, and I really believe in the power of learning the history, the palimpsest of layers that have been put into a house. Who has lived it in the past, who’s living in it now. What everyone feels and thinks and believes about it.

15:00

I appreciate a collaborative design process, and for you, someone who is listening to this podcast, because you may want to plan remodeling changes to your own home someday. And by plan, I both mean hire someone to create a design for you, in which case you need to be able to know what you like and recognize that when you see it. Or someone who is going to hire someone to design something for you and then carry it out yourself, so you need to be able to share in their vision so you can execute on the design.

15:32

Or someone who is going to do your own design process for yourself, and that might mean a whole master plan, or it might be just someone who will confidently pick a piece of furniture for your own house, a new bedspread, a new light fixture, go looking online for something that fits a bill, buy it and put it into the room. If you want to be the kind of person who makes those decisions from a place of confidence and not just realizing you need a lamp, going to target, seeing what lamps are on the shelves, grabbing one, coming home and plugging it in, then wondering why your living room feels a little cold and reminds you strongly of your strongly of your first college apartment.

16:05

Where am I going with this? The documenting process is part of discovery, but discovery is so much more than that, for you and for me, people who believe that the design, the good ideas for a house are going to be inspired not just by its dimensional reality, but by its history. But there’s more. There’s a deeper why, why the discovery process is also really beneficial to you, to anyone who wants to make good choices for their own home, and to every single one of my ready to remodel students. And that’s because anything you learn about your house in any way, from finding an old map of it to just closely studying it, to chatting with the neighbors about it, to reading books on mid-century history is going to serve your end goal of feeling more like the expert in your own home.

16:57

The discovery process is personal. It itself is unique to every single person that does it. And I can’t tell you what the most important thing you’ll learn about your house will be in the end, in order to give you a good creative design idea, or to just make you feel calm and confident as you talk to all the various people who are going to be involved in giving you quotes and bids and coming into your house to do work on it, the most important thing that will land for you is going to depend on yourself. So the best guidance I can give you is to find an area.

17:26

Actually, I’m going to give you two pieces of contradictory advice. One, find an area where you are already confident in your personal or professional life and then extend out from that, like building out from a landmass into the water or identify. Let’s use that same metaphor. Identify an island in the distance that feels pretty unfamiliar to yourself, and then rowboat yourself across to get familiar with something completely different from what you’re good at already in your personal or professional life. So one approach is just to broaden your own comfort level and relate that into some aspect of planning a remodel for a mid-century home.

18:05

And the other is to make more of an outpost into something you’re not comfortable with and grow comfort from there. This might look like if you are an English teacher in your day job. You might know how to research well by reading. You might feel like getting some books on mid-century history, the history of design, some famous people, and just flipping through them to try to internalize who are the big names in graphic design, who are some of the architects of this era. So then you’re looking up Cliff May and Eichler and Levitt. If you’re an English teacher, you probably like primary sources. But you can also do a lot of this research starting from the Google search window.

18:35

The flip side of that approach is to go far away, to go find your far Island might be to get some books from the library on simple DIY maintenance and repair. Your Public Library probably has the collection of Black and Decker books on how to DIY a bathroom remodel or a basement remodel. And these are well illustrated, clearly, simply explained, just a nice way to walk yourself through some basic construction terminology, a little bit of basic building code, the number of outlets required for a kitchen, for example, will come up what plumbing looks like behind your walls.

19:08

And the goal is not necessarily to get yourself ready to DIY this work, but just to feel like it’s not completely foreign to you. So when you’ve got a plumber walking through the house giving you a quote, you’ve got a little bit more idea of some of the jargon that they might drop on you. On the opposite side, if your day job is in engineering of some sort, you might choose the reverse. You might first start by extending your technical knowledge in computers or mechanics or what have you, into the mechanical structure and systems of house. Just extend your existing body of how things work in a practical, mechanical way, or the flip side for you might be some visual research.

19:46

Spend an evening watching a couple of period movies set in the 1960s just to run your eyes across some organically chosen sets and locations filled with authentic details from the year your house was built. Research doesn’t have to look like work, and it doesn’t. Have to be hard. Here’s an alternative for the extroverts among us, some of the research of discovery might be just talking to your eldest neighbors, the people who lived on your block way back then, or to your own elders at a family reunion about what they remember about their very first cool, stylish furniture purchase, or what they remember from their parents’ childhood homes.

20:21

One really fun way to do some research on your home, to expand your discovery process, to get more confident about your own house and its history, is maps and mapping, and unless you are a cartographer, which, hi, I actually got my undergraduate degree in geography and took a number of courses in cartography my senior year of college. But even for me, this feels like branching out from my typical area of expertise.

20:48

This is actually something that’s really fun and in the modern world, quite easy to do, and some of the research, one of the first areas of discovery research I did for my own home as I was trying to adjust as a person with a lot of background in residential architecture but not a lot of familiarity with mid-century architecture. I wanted to enrich my depth of expertise in the mid-century era.

21:11

So this is sort of me building off my own land mass of knowledge. So I went online and pulled together a series of maps of the greater Madison Area my location from various publication dates, ranging from the 1930s up until the 1970s I put them all into Photoshop over a Google map, but you could do this in Canva, set them to the same scale, and move them into various layers of transparency until I could overlap them and see the progressive development from just around the Capitol, expanding outwards fields turning into developments throughout the mid-century era.

21:46

Now, Madison itself doubled in size during the mid-century years from a population point of view, and nearly half of our housing stock today is from that era. So you can clearly see that on a map I created. I did a podcast episode about this, or maybe it was just a blog post probably six years ago. I will link to it in the show notes, and you can see how much of Madison’s general Map Zone is yellow, the color I designated as built between 1940 and 1960 you could do the same for your era now. From there, I then knew where to go around town to look for mid-century neighborhoods.

22:24

And what I didn’t do at the time, but I would now, if I was starting from scratch, I would do it all over again, is to set the map up with progressive layers so I could see how it grew 1950 to 1955 to 1960 and so on. Maybe I didn’t have those precise years of maps. But I know I had multiple maps during the era, and so it would be kind of fun to see which directions filled in and why, and sort of look for these are 50s neighborhoods. These are 60s neighborhoods. Here’s a 70s neighborhood. See the visual differences specifically in those parts of it.

22:56

Now that I think about it, I probably still have that Photoshop file with the original maps in it. This is making me want to go track it down and organize those layers into time gradations. But as you’re going through this process yourself, you can take any amount of pleasure in the detailing of it, or just get a generalized sense of like, When do the neighborhoods around your house appear, and how much more you want to go through it so you might not have if you’re not living in a state capital town, you might not have quite as many layers of maps available to you, but there is certainly a digital map.

23:32

There’s a Google map of your neighborhood right now, and there is probably some historical record that you can go find now, if you don’t live in the state capitol like I do, you might not have the dozens or even hundreds of map options easily available online that I found with a bit like a very little bit of online digging. If you live in a more remote spot, your data options will be more limited, but there is going to be historic map information available to you somewhere. If you’re struggling to find what you need, hit up the reference librarian at your local public library, that person is here to help you answer your questions about life in your region, your personal history, make their day and go ask them a really nerdy question, they will be happy about it.

24:13

And then I would point you to this Sanborn fire insurance map collection. Now I can’t guarantee that your house is on one of these maps, because that depends on the last map date in your area, but there is, in all likelihood, a Sanborn fire insurance map of your area. It just might not include your house. So here’s where you definitely want to drop by, the show notes page, because I’m going to put a bunch of helpful links that my wonderful Operations Manager Rebecca turned up for this episode on the Sanborn collection specifically and how to interpret them, including speaking of reference librarians, a really lovely video put together by a librarian at the Library of Congress on their collection of fire insurance maps. And sort of the history of maps and mapping and interpreting these maps themselves.

24:59

Um. Um, I tend I have a very was able to instantly call to mind a visual of this, because they’re done on a sort of a cream colored paper with these lovely pastel bits of coloring for different fire zones and important designations. But as you go digging a little deeper, let’s talk about the kinds of information you can pull out of specifically just this one kind of map. Little background on the Sanborn fire insurance maps. Before we do that is that these were designed to assist fire insurance agents in determining the degree of hazard associated with a particular property.

25:37

So they have all this data about size, shape, construction materials, whether it’s a dwelling or a commercial building, factories, noting firewall separations, locations of windows, doors, sprinkler systems, types of roof. The Sanborn collection has 50,000 editions of fire insurance maps, probably 700,000 individual sheets. And the Library of Congress has the largest existing collection of these maps produced by the map Sanborn map company.

26:06

So these were a product actually we if you think about a big fire in the US, you probably think of the Great Chicago Fire. But earlier than that, there was a big fire event in New York City in 1835 that wiped out most of the small insurance companies in the US, because they just couldn’t handle all of the risk at the same time. If that feels unfortunately eerily familiar to you right now, yes, we are living in a new age of insurance companies not quite being set up to handle the amount of risk that’s existing in the world.

26:38

And I guess as an architect, I can’t that’s not a problem I can solve. I can only acknowledge it. But I think maybe it’s helpful to look back and see like we’ve encountered this problem in the past, and the concept of insurance has not gone away as a result of it, although we have sort of needed to rewrite our expectations around it anyway, after a big fire in New York in 1835, new larger firms formed themselves. Local Governments started to pass a lot of fire safety regulations meant to make it inherently less risky to have properties built, and then there were maps made to assess the associated risks of different areas. Da Sanborn was a young surveyor for Somerville, Massachusetts, who started in 1866 for the Aetna Insurance Company, specifically to prepare insurance maps in Tennessee.

27:31

Then he went on to do a comprehensive mapping of Boston, also for Aetna in 1876 interesting that Aetna has been around more than 100 years, feels like a long time in this country anyway. I’m sure other countries would be like, Yeah, more than 100 years. That’s not exactly a lineage here. But these maps, Sanborn just was tremendously comprehensive of making these there were other map fire insurance map publishers, hexamer ratio, fire underwriters, inspection Bureau, but Sanborn maps are generally the most comprehensive. Each of these maps has the same formatting, the same type of information. So if you can interpret the maps in your town, you could do this as a Thanksgiving party trip.

28:12

You could look up the maps for everybody at the table, wherever in the region they come from, or your hometown, or your grandparents’ house, whatever you want, and find information about the properties. Now, back when I was killing time in the Graduate School Library waiting to go up and claim the study Carol, I used to start by indexing from the front of the big old map book where I was going and then finding the page number and going to it. These days you’re going to go online; you’ll be able to just sort of search from a generalized map.

28:42

Zoom in to the location you’re looking for. You don’t need to worry about indexes. You’ll see the original house numbers, which may or may not be the same house numbers as we have today. You’ll see that each building is color coded to indicate the type of material the building is made of. Green for fireproof construction. Interestingly, also green for Adobe, which is pretty fireproof. Stone buildings are done in blue. Similarly, concrete, lime Cinder, cement block, hollow concrete and concrete in first all the same blue tile buildings are pink, red-ish, same as brick also brick veneer, although brick veneer is noted as a red outline with a yellow interior, because yellow buildings mean a frame building, so a stick frame a wooden construction, and most mid-century houses would be that.

29:29

So if it’s got a brick veneer, it would be yellow on the inside and pinker on the edge. If it’s an actual brick structure, it’s pink. There’s also listings for gates, walls without openings, and if there is an opening, the size in inches, walls with openings on the specific floors, driveways and passageways, stables and auto houses or private garages. I love auto. Automobile house. It’s an abbreviation. I just absolutely love this.

30:00

In some cases, you’ll see dashed or dotted lines over the top of the building showing the roof construction where it’s a mansard roof, a gable, a flat roof. You’ll see window openings set into different stories, and sometimes just the number of stories listed, elevators and frame closed elevators are listed. Brick chimneys are listed. So you’re going to see all this information that’s basically specific to fire safety, but also gives you a lot of detail about what was extant, what existed at a certain time in history, in a particular place, for a mid-century era map, you’ll find a lot of information about what was the original layout of a building, just a simple rectangle, if it had a projecting porch or an L shaped space, much more rare than on a modern construction.

30:48

A lot of those will be additions, but you’ll see little outlines for a little pushed outside porch or a little kitchen pantry. You’ll see where there was or was not an attached or detached garage at the time, and you can just generally see how the commercial spaces around residential neighborhoods were the same as they are now or not again. Pop over to the show notes page for a link. But Rebecca turned up this amazing combination of old insurance maps, old insurance maps.net, actually, which was created by Adam Cox as a thesis project, and then has endured as a non-commercial space to explore layered old map details.

31:26

So new maps are added through request and local groups. He has a newsletter and a blog, and it’s just really fun to see your space with a Google Map underlay, and then all the various historical maps that are possible layered one over another over another, sometimes going back as far as the 1860s and coming far as forward as the 1960s so 100 year history of mapping layered over our modern understanding of what the world looks like from a navigational point of view. Rebecca pulled maps for Madison, my town, Tacoma, her town. And it’s really fun to see how this history sort of layers up.

32:06

I think you’ll get a kick out of findanding yours, as well as, again, huge nerd here and former cartographer student. And I find these to be really, really interesting and how densely they contain relevant bits of information. I find a great website. Again, I will link in the show notes, historicalinfo.com which is interpreting, has a guide to interpreting the Sanborn maps, including the visual reference to the sort of visual key to an original map book. And it’s noting. It’s giving verbal descriptions of what you can get out of an individual property’s annotation. There’s a lot of info on downtown commercial spaces, paragraphs and paragraphs about skylights and access Windows and fire protection sprinklers.

32:48

But even for something relatively simple, like a residential block, you can see a variation in housing types or a lack of variation in housing types. And for something as simple as one residential property. There is a map instance that just looks like two yellow rectangles next to each other, each with not a complete word in it. One has the number one, the letter A, a tiny letter X, and the other yellow rectangle says b, r, dot, v, e, n, d, first 2b, 1x, X and D. But from this we can interpret, and I’m going to go ahead and quote this site occupancy is indicated by the letter D, which means a private residential building occupied by no more than two families.

33:30

The yellow color indicates frame construction, so not brick or stone. The First floor has a veneering of brick, which is indicated by the b, r, v, e, n, d, first note, but this does not affect the coloring, because it’s veneer. The story height as designated by 2b in the left hand corner means that two full stories are over a basement. That basement designation wouldn’t come in unless the floor was below the ground and the ceiling was at least four feet above the ground.

The Wood had the roof has wood covered with wood shingles, which is indicated by the small cross in the right corner. And wood roofs were never specifically noted unless they are the only exception to an otherwise fire resistive building. On the front of the building, there’s an open frame porch, one story in height, which you can see, and actually a little dashed line that I didn’t notice.

34:15

It’s all about rectangle number two, and then the first little rectangle I mentioned that says one, a x, that tells us there is a one story frame private auto House indicated by the letter A with a wood shingle roof covering that was occupied by not more than two cars. Otherwise capacity would be noted. So I just, I love how condensed maps can be, and they can tell us so much, as long as we know how to interpret them. So getting a little deeper into the history of your space requires not just finding information but learning how to interpret it.

34:48

And that process, if you’ve got the time and leisure, can be really fun. Maps may or may not be the way you spend time getting to know your house, discovering it, but when you’ve done the research to understand the. Date of last fire mapping of your house and interpret the fire construction. You’re going to be just a little less intimidated by someone who comes to your house spouting a lot of jargon, and you’re going to be a little more willing to say, Hey, could you explain what you meant by that? Or, honestly, be a little turned off by someone who only speaks to you in jargon because they’re probably trying to intimidate you into not asking questions they don’t feel like answering. That’s my hot take on that.

35:23

Anyway, in the spirit of nerd recognizing nerd, I just want to read you this little intro from the 1940 edition of the Sanborn map. This booklet sets forth the manner in which users of Sanborn maps may readily familiarize themselves with the salient details of our publications, many requests from customers have been received for descriptive manner outlining the best method of utilizing our maps.

35:47

While it should prove of the greatest value to those with little experience with our maps, we are convinced that it will be successful in refreshing the memories of all in reviewing this subject. Then there’s pages more information, but the zinger at the end is the time spent in a thorough study of the following pages will, well, repay you.

36:09

Indeed. You know what? I actually have nothing. So I don’t quibble with that at all. I think that’s completely true. And I just feel like scrolling through some of these pages all over again. I have no criticism of myself past me for spending so much time hanging out with the Sanborn map book back in my college days. I kind of wish I had one right now, but they are bulky, so the internet is our dear friend here. Apologies, by the way, for giving you my stream of consciousness interpretation. But I was actually realizing that that little description of the residential property I gave you was from the guide to interpret was from inside the map book, the guide to interpreting the maps.

36:45

So yeah, thank you whoever wrote this incredibly nerdy cartographic guide to the Sanborn maps? I will 100% link to this page so you can enjoy all the nerdiness for yourself. More important, though, than any delight in nerdy, historically, 75 year old cartography, or following along the links, going and checking out mapping of your own area, is finding the way that you’re going to learn more about your house. That is going to make you feel more well versed in its history. That is going to make you feel like the expert in and on your own home. Now, everybody is the expert in their own home in the sense of how it feels to wake up and go to sleep there the weird noises in the night.

37:31

By the way, I’m going to shout out my friends over at the Craftsman blog, they sent out a hilarious email newsletter last week with a reference to the fact that Halloween is a perfect time to blame any weird noises you hear in your house to ghosts, not expensive stuff you have to fix, and they work on houses that are even older than the mid-century. I love this. Creaky floors, haunted drafty windows, ghosts coming and going, mysterious cold spots, paranormal activity. Obviously, their email summed it up as instant character, zero budget, your old house isn’t falling apart. It’s just atmospheric.

38:11

By the way, they point out that this is a great strategy for Halloween, but in January, when you’re wearing a parka indoors, it loses its charm, and you should think about enacting some repairs on your house as needed. But my point is, you are the expert in the weird drafts that your house has, or where are the sunny corners, or what it feels like. What’s the best room in the house to watch the sun come up in the spring?

38:34

Does that feel different in the winter, knowing where you reach in the dark for something the ease of connection between one space and another. Those are things you are an expert in, because you live them every day, and no building inspector or contractor or architect can tell you better than you know yourself what works and what doesn’t work in your house. But I want you to feel as a mid-century homeowner, as someone planning an eventual mid-century remodel. I want you to feel empowered in more ways than just knowing what it feels like to live in your house.

39:04

I want you to feel confident in whatever way suits you best, whether that means knowing a little bit more of construction terminology or knowing a little more mid-century history, or just thinking back to the time you looked up your Sanborn fire insurance maps or any historical mapping data around your house for fun, because you are a person who knows about your house, this is going to help you feel more empowered, more confident, and drive good decision making from start to finish in your home remodel process.

39:32

If you are, however, a cartography nerd, reach out on Instagram and say, hey. Reply to the email you get with this podcast and say, Hello, I would love to know you better tell me what interesting map research you’ve done on your own home, and I will share mine with you in the show notes page. That’s going to be it for today. Actually, I will just say Don’t miss the show notes. I’ve got all sorts of links to both resources for finding maps in your own area, and that really great. Is key to the Sanborn insurance maps filled with the original text, which is so old timey snarky I adore it in the show notes page at mid mod, dash, midwest.com/ 2215.

40:10

And next week, I will be back to dig into that concept of grandfathering in a mid-century house and how our mid-century homes have features that we should or just could update any time of the day or week, and certainly that you will need to consider as a requirement in updating if you get intensely enough into a home remodel project. So things you don’t want to be surprised by things you want, even if you’re not DIY-ing, a single thing on your house, things you don’t want to be shocked by when the contractor adds this extra work to your sort of checklist of necessary items and therefore cost. So we’ll talk about that next week.

40:54

Meanwhile, if you’re looking for some fellow nerds or just support in learning more about your mid-century house, you’re always welcome inside the ready to remodel program. You can learn about that anytime and join us anytime, even though we are in the middle of a mid modern Mod Squad right now, the water is warm. Come on in. Everybody in the group right now is super nice, and you can find out more about that program by going to mid mod dash, midwest.com/ready, but for the most part, right now, just get yourself on over to the internet and look up the historical mapping information for your house or your mom’s house.

41:29

You know what? Your mileage may vary, but I’m definitely pulling this out as a party trick for Thanksgiving, we’ll be looking up my grandparents’ houses, my uncle’s house, the place where my friend who come stay with me over the holidays, hello, lived, and her family has lived in various places across the US. We are going to be digging into this, and I, at least I have a marvelous time doing it. Catch you next week, mid mod remodeler.

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