1914 Corpus Christi, Texas Sanborn Fire Insurance Maps and Atlas

This is a complete color facsimile of Insurance Maps of Corpus Christi, Nueces County, Texas, published by the Sanborn Map Company of New York in January 1914. All thirty sheets are reproduced in full color from the original survey.

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 — yellow for frame, red for brick, blue for stone, gray for iron, brown for fireproof — with street numbers, relative building heights, fire walls, iron doors and shutters, window openings by story, stables, and fire stations.

Sheet 1 carries the key map of the whole city, laid out between Nueces Bay and Corpus Christi Bay with Salt Lake behind the bluff, dividing the survey into thirty numbered sheets, together with a location map showing the town's place on the Texas Gulf coast.

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 a Gulf port that was also a resort: the Nueces, Seaside, Southern, State, Belden, Pavilion and Corpus Beach hotels, the Alta Vista Hotel and Sanitarium, the Natatorium, Loyd's Pavilion, the Golf & Country Club House, and the Epworth by the Sea Methodist camp meeting ground — set against a working waterfront of Dietsch's Wharf, the Central and municipal wharves, the Caldwell, Mormon and Trott cotton gins, the Taylor Grain and Elevator Co., the Sidbury, Southland, South Texas, Nueces, Hill and Carroll lumber companies, Armour and Swift meat warehouses, the Gulf Refining, Texas Company and Pierce-Fordyce oil depots, the Union Depot and the St. L. B. & M., S. A. & A. P. and T. M. railroad depots, City Hall, the County Court House and Jail, and Spohn Sanitarium. The index also names the city's Mexican and segregated institutions as they stood in 1914 — Corpus Christi College, the Mexican Club House, Presbyteriana Mexicana Iglesia, the Fourth Ward (Mexican) School, and the separate Negro high school and churches.

Sheet 1 also carries the underwriters' report: a population of 17,000; twenty miles of water pipe drawing on the Nueces River sixteen miles northwest of town, with 200 double and 24 triple hydrants; and a fire department still all-volunteer but for a paid chief and two drivers, with an American LaFrance motor pumper on order for delivery by that January.

Reproduced from the copy in the Library of Congress. An essential reference for genealogists, house historians, and collectors of Corpus Christi and South Texas history.

32 pages. 8.5" x 11". Full color. Paperback.

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