Sanborn Fire Insurance Maps of Galveston, Texas (1899)

In the summer of 1899 the Sanborn-Perris Map Company sent its surveyors through every street in Galveston, Texas. This facsimile reproduces the resulting volume entire — all 102 sheets, deposited for copyright on August 24, 1899, a year and two weeks before the hurricane of September 8, 1900 destroyed much of the city they record. The sheets are reproduced in full color from the high-resolution scans held by the Geography and Map Division of the Library of Congress, with fold lines, library stamps, and the copyright date left exactly as found.

Drawn at fifty feet to the inch for fire insurance underwriters, the sheets show every building on the island at its exact footprint, colored by construction — yellow for wood frame, pink for brick, blue for stone — with height in stories, dashed lines for porches and sheds, and notes on roofs, boilers, watchmen, and lamps. Address numbers run along the building fronts and water-main diameters along the streets, so any block can be followed sheet to sheet.

The index map opens the volume with the surveyors' census of the city's defenses: water piped from thirty flowing wells at Alta Loma, 487 hydrants, sixty-three firemen and four steam engines. Beyond it lie the Galveston Wharf Company's piers 10 to 36 with Elevators "A" and "B" and the Mallory and Morgan warehouses; a key map to the Cotton Compress and Warehouse District; four skeleton sheets of the congested blocks along the Strand; and the buildings of the city itself — the Grand Opera House, the Tremont Hotel, Ball High School, the Ursuline Academy, B'nai Israel, and the Garten Verein pavilion. Sheet 70 walks the beach, where three bath houses stood on posts above the surf and St. Mary's Orphans' Home appears in an inset; every structure on that sheet was taken by the sea on September 8, 1900.

This is Galveston as it stood before the seawall and the grade raising — an essential reference for genealogists, house historians, and collectors of Galveston and Texas history.

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

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