1884 Property and Insurance Atlas and Maps of the City of Reading, Pennsylvania

Property and Insurance Atlas of the City of Reading, Berks County, Penna. was compiled from official records and actual surveys and published by Forsey Breou & Co. of Philadelphia and Reading in 1884. This edition is a complete facsimile, printed in full color, so the hand-colored plates and every page of the original are reproduced as issued.

An insurance atlas is the most detailed map a nineteenth-century city ever got. After the key map of Reading come forty-four plates covering the city block by block at a scale large enough to draw every building in its own footprint, colored by construction so that brick, frame and stone can be told apart at a glance, with lot lines and dimensions, owners' names, street and alley names, house numbers and the position of hydrants, wells and cisterns.

The plates cover the whole of Reading as it stood in 1884: Penn Square and the business district, the Schuylkill River frontage and the Schuylkill Canal, the Philadelphia & Reading railroad yards and shops, the wards climbing toward Mount Penn, Charles Evans Cemetery, City Park, the Berks County Agricultural Society fair grounds, and the newly platted street grid on the northern and eastern edges of the city.

An essential reference for genealogists, house historians, preservationists, and collectors of Reading and Berks County history.

98 pages. 8.5" x 11.25". Full color. Hardcover.

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