1893 Seattle, Washington Sanborn Fire Insurance Maps and Atlas, Volume One

Insurance Maps of Seattle, Washington, published by the Sanborn-Perris Map Co., Limited, of 115 Broadway, New York, in 1893 — reproduced here as a complete color facsimile of Volume One, with all forty-one numbered sheets, the index map and key, the street index, and the full report on the city. Each of the large original sheets is reproduced across two pages, at a scale of fifty feet to the inch.

Four years earlier, on June 6, 1889, fire destroyed the entire business portion of Seattle inside the fire limits. Sanborn's surveyors returned to a city of 60,000 rebuilding in brick and stone, and mapped it building by building. Every structure is drawn in plan and color-coded by construction — brick, frame, iron, stone front, fireproof — with the number of stories, roof material, window and door openings, iron shutters, fire walls, chimneys, steam boilers, and the name of the business inside.

Volume One covers the waterfront and the working city: the wharves, coal bunkers, and cold storage along Elliott Bay, from Schwabacher Bros. & Co. to the Seattle Terminal Railway and Elevator Co.'s grain elevator; Front, Second, and Commercial Streets through Pioneer Square and Yesler Way; the tide flats and the iron works south of town; Broadway and Rainier and Lake Washington Avenues; and outlying sheets for South Seattle, Georgetown, Van Asselt, West Seattle, and Port Blakely.

The front matter is reproduced in full — the report on water supply, the fire department of 72 men and 32 horses, the fire limits, a street-by-street index, and an index of "specials" naming hundreds of individual buildings and businesses, from Denny Clay Co. and Providence Hospital to the Rainier Club and the Opera House and Turn Halle.

For anyone tracing a specific address, a vanished neighborhood, or a Seattle business, these sheets record the city in a detail no other source preserves — an essential reference for genealogists, house historians, and collectors of Seattle history.

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

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