St. Louis Sanborn Map Volume Key

Original Map Source: GISGeography.com
Boundaries added by me

The Sanborn Map Company was, at one time, the largest and most successful map company in the United States. They are best known for their fire insurance maps which are block-by-block illustrations and descriptions of the buildings within a city. They are an invaluable resource for documenting how property and businesses have changed. I've spent a fair number of hours using the Chicago fire insurance maps and they are fairly well documented with a couple of guides to help the average person use them but St. Louis maps have not received the same attention.

Using a modern map, I superimposed a rough outline of the area covered by each Sanborn map volume. Its helpful to recognize that street names have changed, buildings have been destroyed, and highways have been built since these maps were first drawn but the general layout of the city remains the same.

Sanborn first passed through St. Louis in 1903 to map the central area of the city from the river to 14th Street. They returned in 1904 to map the Louisiana Purchase Exposition or St. Louis Worlds Fair as it is also known. The "heavy valued district" was remapped again in 1907 and then in 1908 they began to chart the rest of the city. In 1938, Sanborn revised their maps for the southern part of the city by redrawing borders and adding an additional volume, 20. By the 1940s, they no longer were redrawing maps but instead were distributing corrections to be pasted over the original areas. These occurred, roughly, from 1943-1951 and each revision is noted on the first page of the document.

All the links below go to the Library of Congress' website. They do have software in place to limit the amount of times you can load their website per minute