1896 New Orleans, Louisiana Sanborn Fire Insurance Maps and Atlas, Volume One

This is a complete color facsimile of Volume One of Insurance Maps of New Orleans, Louisiana, published by the Sanborn-Perris Map Co., Limited, of 115 Broadway, New York, in 1896. All ninety-one sheets are reproduced in full color from the original survey, together with the engraved title plate, the index, the key map, and the paste-over correction sheets bound into the volume.

Volume One is the Creole city. The key map runs from the Mississippi River and Jackson Square through the whole French Quarter grid — Decatur, Chartres, Royal, Bourbon, Dauphine, Burgundy and Rampart — with Canal Street at its edge and Volume Four beyond it. From there it crosses Basin and the Old Basin past the St. Louis cemeteries into Tremé, down Esplanade and Elysian Fields into Faubourg Marigny, out through the Seventh Ward to Broad and Bayou Road, and along Bayou St. John and the Grand Route to the Fair Grounds and the Louisiana Jockey Club.

A full street index and a separate "Specials" index of named firms and institutions make it possible to find any address or business by sheet number. What they record is the old city entire: the St. Louis Cathedral, the French Opera House, the French Market, the U.S. Mint and the U.S. Custom House and Post Office, the Supreme Court of Louisiana and the Second District Court, Tulane Medical College, the Grand Opera House, D. H. Holmes' department store, the Louisiana Sugar Exchange and the American Sugar Refining Co., the Jackson and American breweries, the Crescent, Planters, Lanaux, Socola and St. Louis rice mills, Leidenheimer's bakery, the cooperages and shoe factories, and the French, Tremé, Lebreton, St. Bernard and Rocheblave markets.

It also names the institutions of Black and immigrant New Orleans as they stood in 1896: the Asile Thomy-Lafon, the Sisters of the Holy Family Convent, Morris Brown Church, the African M.E. Church, the Negro Public School at 308 N. Robertson, St. Peter's Baptist Church, the Union Française, the Lusitanian Portuguese Benevolent Association, the Italian Catholic Church, St. Johannes' Evangelical Lutheran Church and School, and the Convent du Mont Carmel — alongside eight McDonogh schools.

The index sheet also carries the underwriters' report for 1896: a population of 285,000; water works in private hands, drawing from the Mississippi through Allis and Knowles pumps into a 168-foot standpipe and four reservoirs, with 98½ miles of cast-iron pipe; 1,429 hydrants of six different patterns at an average pressure of thirty-two pounds, plus sixty-one fire wells; and a fire department of 275 officers and men with twenty-six engines, nine chemical engines and a water tower. A note records that many hydrants appear on the sheets with no water pipe behind them — ordered by the City Council, and not yet laid.

Drawn at fifty feet to an inch, Sanborn fire insurance maps are the most detailed record that survives of an American city's built fabric. Each sheet shows individual buildings block by block, color-coded by construction — fireproof, iron, brick with metal cornice, frame or stone front, brick specials, and frame — with story heights, roof materials, mansard roofs in iron or frame, fire walls, division-wall iron doors, iron shutters, window openings by story, skylights, stables, chimneys, steam boilers, hydrants and fire-alarm boxes. The New Orleans key carries a symbol most volumes do not: D.W., for dormer windows.

Reproduced from the copy in the Library of Congress. Volume One of the set. An essential reference for genealogists, house historians, and collectors of New Orleans and Louisiana history.

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

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