05/17/2023
🔥 What do good maps and fire insurance have to do with each other?
As Cobleskill became a bustling town in the late 19th century, the fear of fire spreading between closely spaced buildings was a real and dangerous threat. Good fire insurance policies were a necessary cost of doing business. But long before insurance companies used underwriting to assess risk, they relied upon map-makers who surveyed towns and diagramed the buildings with their associated risk. Sanborn Fire Insurance Maps was the most famous company contracted to draw these detailed diagrams and they surveyed more than 12,000 towns and cities across the United States, including Cobleskill. Agents from the Sanborn Company came to Cobleskill in 1887, 1892, 1898, 1904, 1909 and 1927 to survey and draw all of the buildings in the growing town.
What's great about these maps for history? The Sanborn maps include a footprint of each building and outbuilding in Cobleskill as the town center grew. The maps show change over time in each of the different mapped years as porches and additions and new buildings go up. Most interestingly, though, is that the maps tell us what types of businesses occupied different commercial buildings over time.
All of these maps survive and provide amazing snapshots of life in those years.
Most of the maps are available on the Library of Congress' digital archive (https://www.loc.gov/rr/geogmap/sanborn/). The 1927 set is not yet digitized and has to be accessed at the New York State Library. Stay tuned next week for some interesting questions that these maps of Cobleskill can help answer.
