1889 Fire Insurance Maps and Atlas of Portland, Oregon, Volume 1: The Complete Sanborn One, in Forty-One Double-Page Sheets

In 1889 the Sanborn Map & Publishing Co. of New York surveyed Portland for the fire-insurance trade, drawing the city at fifty feet to the inch across forty-one large double-page sheets. 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 the wharves, warehouses and mills along the Willamette, the business blocks of Front, First, Second and Third Streets, the hotels, theatres, churches and public buildings, and the residential streets spreading west toward the hills. The surveyors' own report puts the population at 40,000, with a paid fire department of seventy-six men, four steamers and 138 hydrants.This Exile Books edition reproduces the volume complete and in full colour: the report and index sheet, the key map and all forty-one double-page sheets, each laid out as a two-page spread. 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 Portland address back to the 1880s.