Digital Sanborn Maps, 1867-1970 : Browse Maps

With Digital Sanborn Maps, you can:

• Browse ~660,000 maps of 12,000 American cities and towns.
• Navigate the collection using an intuitive interface featuring handy drop-down menus.
• Easily examine multiple maps for towns and cities through numbered thumbnail views.
• Review key and index maps to find specific streets and buildings.
• Pan over the map sheet using arrow buttons.
• Magnify maps for greater detail.
• Download and print maps (in whole or part) in the Adobe® PDF format.

Sanborn Maps were originally published in color, yet the digital maps are displayed in black and white because the digital maps were created by scanning microfilm. Because the original maps were filmed in black and white, the digital images are also in black and white. Due to this source, color images cannot be made available and a map legend has been specifically created for the black and white images.

Digital Sanborn Maps, 1857-1970 contains maps for all 50 states and Washington, D.C.

To find out which maps are available for your state, navigate to this website: http://www.proquest.com/en-US/promos/sanbornmaps.shtml.

While the addresses in the Digital Sanborn Maps, 1857-1970 database are not searchable, you can browse the maps by selecting the state, city, and date.  See the screenshot in the "Browsing" window on the left side of this page.

Once you have selected the desired state, city, and date, you will see thumbnails of all of the sheets available.

1. Click a thumbnail to refresh the page and view the map in the Map Viewer.

2. Navigate back to the top of the page to select a different city and/or date.

3. If you already know what sheet you are looking for, possibly from a cited reference, you may select the sheet number to 'jump' to.

4. Click "Next" to navigate to the following page of map thumbnails.