Mapping a Boomtown: Sanborn Fire Insurance Maps of Deadwood, SD, 1885?1915

Between 1885 and 1915 the Sanborn Map Company of New York surveyed Deadwood six times, and this volume reprints every sheet of all six surveys. These were working documents, not decoration: fire insurance underwriters used them to judge, from a desk two thousand miles away, whether a wooden theater packed against a gulch wall was worth insuring. At a scale of fifty feet to the inch, every building in town is drawn to its footprint and colored by construction ? yellow for frame, pink for brick, blue for stone, gray for iron ? with notes on roofs, walls, stoves, boilers, and the water available to fight the fire everyone knew was coming. The first edition here was surveyed in October 1885, when the sheets still read ?Deadwood, D.T.? ? Dakota Territory. Its title sheet records a population of 3,500, ?water facilities very good,? and a fire department of exactly two independent hose carts: ?no steam & no hand engines.? A signed panel shows the local insurance agents personally attested the survey. Across the next five editions the reader can watch a gold camp harden into a city. The 1891 sheets add railroads, a street railway, and a 120-man volunteer department; 1897 counts 150 men and seven hose carts. The 1903 survey shows a town rebuilding ? the Opera House drawn as ?ruins,? a lot marked ?Carnegie Free Library to be built here,? another reserved for a U.S. Government building. By 1909 the printed population reaches 7,000 and five fire companies muster 300 members. The 1915 edition notes Main Street brick-paved, two reservoirs holding 270,000 gallons, and a steel-and-concrete garage for seventy-five automobiles. The details reward a slow eye. The Gem Theatre stands on Main Street with its ?dance ho.? and wine rooms marked. Chinatown appears along lower Main with laundries, lodgings, and a Joss House. Saloons, gambling rooms, breweries, bottling works, smelters, and a ring of cyanide mills come and go ? later editions candidly note mills ?not in operation? and ?going to ruin,? the map trade?s quiet record of a mining economy cooling. Each edition opens with its original first sheet, carrying the title block, a key map showing how the numbered sheets fit together, and ? in the larger editions ? a street index and the surveyor?s notes on water works and fire apparatus quoted above. Dashed outlines mark sheds and porches; small circles mark hydrants; street-front numbers give addresses. The sheets are reproduced here as unaltered facsimiles of the Sanborn Map Company?s originals, from the high-resolution scans preserved by the Geography and Map Division of the Library of Congress. Fold lines, edition stamps, and the occasional surveyor?s smudge have been left exactly as found. 60 pages. 8.5" x 11". Full color. Paperback. Satisfaction guaranteed or you can send it back.…