1888 Fire Insurance Maps and Atlas of Washington, D.C.: The Complete Sanborn District Columbia

In 1888 the Sanborn Map & Publishing Company of New York surveyed Washington for the fire-insurance trade, drawing the capital at sixty feet to the inch across large double-page sheets. Every building is shown to scale and colour-coded for construction, with its height, use and street number recorded, and hydrants, water mains, alarm boxes and steam boilers noted. The volume opens with a street index and an index to public buildings, then a key map of the whole city from Georgetown to the Navy Yard with the surveyor's report on the fire department and water supply, and works sheet by sheet through the blocks around the Capitol, the Mall and the Executive Mansion, the hotels, theatres and stores of Pennsylvania Avenue, the Center Market, the Patent Office and Judiciary Square, the wharves and lumber yards of the Potomac and Eastern Branch fronts, the Navy Yard and Arsenal, and the row-house streets of the Northwest and Southeast.This Exile Books edition is an unabridged facsimile republication of the 1888 volume, reproduced complete and in full colour from the copy held by the Geography and Map Division of the Library of Congress: the two index pages, the key map and all forty-one numbered double-page sheets, each laid out as a two-page spread. It is a primary source for the building stock, street pattern and businesses of Washington in the 1880s, and an essential reference for local historians, genealogists, architectural historians and anyone tracing the history of a Washington property.