clair055

I discovered early on in my teaching career that I couldn’t get my point across to students without a map.    I had pull-down maps in my classroom, but I rarely used them because they were mounted over my white boards, and they would cover up other information students needed access to    The mounted maps rarely had the information I needed to show students at the time as well, so I would just draw a quick outline of the United States on the board, fill the map in with whatever I was teaching at the time, and then move on. Recently, I ran across a map source I was unaware of – a resource used by historical researchers, city planners, preservationist, genealogists, and even sociologists. I’m speaking of Sanborn Maps – maps that were created from 1867 to 1970 detailing town and building information for approximately 12,000 towns and cities in the United States. The Sanborn Company was founded by Daniel A. Sanborn in 1867.   The original purpose of the maps was for fire insurance assessm