North Carolina Maps: Sanborn Fire Insurance Maps

North Carolina Sanborn^® Maps

From 1867 to 1977, the Sanborn^® Map Company of Pelham, New York, produced large-scale (usually 50 feet to the inch) color maps of commercial and industrial districts of some 12,000 towns and cities in North America to assist fire insurance companies in setting rates and terms. Each set of maps represented each built structure in those districts, its use, dimensions, height, building material, and other relevant features (fire alarms, water mains and hydrants, for example). The intervals between new map editions for a given town or city in the early decades of the twentieth century varied according to the pace and scale of urban growth — from a few years to more than five years. In all, Sanborn^® produced 50,000 editions comprising some 700,000 individual map pages.

North Carolina Collection Sanborn^® Fire Insurance Maps
The North Carolina Collection at UNC-Chapel Hill holds the most comprehensive collection of Sanborn^® maps in North Carolina. The holdings range in date from the 1880s to the 1950s and cover more than 150 cities and towns across the state. North Carolina Maps features online all of the North Carolina Collection's Sanborn^® maps produced through 1922. Maps published after that date will remain available for use on microfilm in the North Carolina Collection reading room.