1926 Waco, Texas Sanborn Fire Insurance Maps and Atlas, Volume One

Insurance Maps of Waco, including East Waco, Texas, Volume One, published by the Sanborn Map Company of New York in 1926 — reproduced here as a complete color facsimile, with all eighty-six numbered sheets, the ten supplementary sheets, the key map, and the full street and business indexes.

Sanborn's surveyors mapped a city of 60,000 with thirty miles of paved streets, a water system drawing on the Brazos River and artesian wells, and a fully paid fire department of ninety men in eight stations with all-motorized apparatus. Every building is drawn in plan and color-coded by construction — brick, frame, stone, concrete, fireproof — with the number of stories, roof and wall materials, window and door openings, elevators, sprinklers, steam boilers, fire escapes, and the name of the business inside.

The sheets cover the business district around Austin Avenue and the courthouse, the Brazos River crossings and the cotton compresses and oil mills along the railroads, the residential blocks out to the city limits, and East Waco across the river. Landmarks appear building by building: Waco High School in reinforced concrete, the Catholic Church of the Assumption and the Academy of the Sacred Heart, Baylor University, Paul Quinn College, the Amicable Life Insurance building, Sanger Bros. department store, the county courthouse and jail, the Orpheum and Hippodrome theatres, the Texas Cotton Palace, Temple Rodef Sholom, and the Natatorium, Metropole, and Raleigh hotels.

Because the maps were drawn for fire underwriters rather than for tourists, they record what other sources leave out — warehouses, gins, laundries, garages, filling stations, boarding houses, and the segregated schools and churches of 1920s Waco, each named and located.

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

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

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