Sanborn Maps at the Filson

Sanborn Fire Insurance Maps for Louisville, Jefferson County, Kentucky

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Filson Holdings

Online Access

General Information

Fire insurance maps are detailed city plans, usually at scales of 50 or 100 feet to an inch. They show individual building footprints, complete with construction details such as building material, number of stories, building use, and more. The maps were originally produced for insurance underwriters, but are now of use to researchers in history, urban geography, architectural history, and other fields. They are commonly referred to as Sanborn maps because the Sanborn company was the largest national producer.

Sanborn Fire Insurance maps typically include the following information: building addresses, height/stories, construction materials, use, and footprints; street names and rights of way. Perhaps most importantly, these maps show change over time. For Louisville, Kentucky, Sanborn maps were produced in 1892, 1905, 1928/1929, 1940/1941, and 1961, but all of these maps were updated over time as the cityscape changed. Each volume includes a map depicting which part of the city is covered, a map key (click to see an example), and a correction record, which provides dates for when updates or corrections were either glued in or added as new pages to the volume (click to see an example). Indexes were also updated and glued in (click to see an example).

The Filson has bound maps from all but the 1892 edition in our library collection, although scattered volumes are missing. You can find a listing of the volumes, their publication date, their final correction/updated date, and existing indexes below. You’ll note that we have multiple versions of the same publication, for example, Volume 3 of the 1905 series. One of these was updated to February 1918, while the other was updated to April 1926, thus the content varies.

Filson Holdings

Online Access

There are also a variety of ways to find digital access to fire insurance maps for Louisville, Kentucky, and beyond.

The Library of Congress provides online access to nationwide Sanborn maps; for Louisville, Kentucky, they have Sanborn Maps for 1892 (three volumes), 1905 (five volumes), 1940 (only volume 1 is digitized). For general information on Sanborn maps, please see Walter Ristow’s article published by the Library of Congress: https://www.loc.gov/collections/sanborn-maps/articles-and-essays/introduction-to-the-collection/ 

The University of Kentucky has a selection of Kentucky city Sanborn maps available on their digital platform, ExploreUK: https://exploreuk.uky.edu/catalog/?f%5Bformat%5D%5B%5D=maps&f%5Bsource_s%5D%5B%5D=Gwen+Curtis+Map+Collection+–+Sanborns&per_page=20 

The Louisville Free Public Library provides access to Kentucky Sanborn maps for library cardholders through their website. Login information is required; see: https://www.lfpl.org/sanborn-maps-1867-1970. For a guide to using this resource, see Steve Wiser’s Using LFPL’s Sanborn Maps [PDF]