1898 Fire Insurance Maps and Atlas of Salt Lake City, Utah, Volume 1: The Complete Sanborn-Perris Fire Insurance Atlas of Salt Lake City, Utah, Volume One, in Ninety-One Sheets

In 1898 the Sanborn-Perris Map Co. of New York surveyed Salt Lake City for the fire-insurance trade, drawing the city at fifty feet to the inch. Every building is shown to scale and colour-coded for construction, with its height, use, street number and hazards noted, together with the hydrants, water mains, steam boilers and fire walls that the underwriters needed to know.

Volume One opens on a report and index of every street and named building, then a key map of the whole city, and works block by block through Temple Square and the Tabernacle, the business blocks of Main, State and West Temple Streets, the hotels, theatres and public buildings, the depots, warehouses and mills along the railroads, and the broad residential blocks of the great grid stretching out toward the Jordan River. It records the city two years after Utah statehood, at the height of its mining-boom prosperity.

This Exile Books edition reproduces the volume complete and in full colour: the title page, the report and index, the key map and all ninety-one numbered sheets. Printed at 8.5 x 11 inches on heavy colour stock, it is a working reference for historians, genealogists, architects, preservationists and anyone tracing a Salt Lake City address back to the 1890s.

The Sanborn-Perris Map Co. of New York was the leading maker of fire insurance maps in the United States. From 1867 its surveyors drew American cities block by block at fifty feet to the inch, recording every building's footprint, construction, height and use for the insurance trade. The Sanborn maps are now the most detailed record of the nineteenth- and twentieth-century American city.