Boardinghouse Guests: The Map Corrector
Herbert Charles Weber (1891–1946) worked most of his life as a “map corrector.” As a guest in Julia Wolfe’s Old Kentucky Home in 1928, he listed his employer’s address at 11 Broadway, N.Y., a prominent location in the financial district of Manhattan. He was an employee of the Sanborn Map Company. A lifelong resident of New Jersey, Herbert was born at Union City, and eventually lived at West Hoboken, just opposite Manhattan via the Lincoln Tunnel. He Married Helen Best in September 1929. She had been a clerk with the New Brunswick Fire Insurance Company. The couple settled in her father’s home at New Brunswick, N. J. As early as June 1917, Herbert’s WWI draft registration shows him working for the Sanborn Map Co., and twenty-five years later in April 1942, his WWII registration card reveals that he is still with the company. He corrected maps until his final days, and passed in April 1946, survived by his wife.
Daniel Sanborn, a surveyor, created his first fire insurance map of Boston in 1866. There was evidently a growing market for this type of work. He established a company and began to create and sell maps of other cities. The maps were sold to fire insurance companies to aid in the assessment of their liabilities for structures in urban areas. It had become cumbersome for the companies to send their own underwriters around the country, so Sanborn’s surveyors spread out across the United States recording detailed notes and diagrams of streets and buildings that were then developed into intricately drawn, hand-colored maps. By 1902, the Sanborn Map Co. had monopolized the industry, eventually covering approximately 12,000 cities in the United States. By 1920, the company employed about 700 people.
The earliest Asheville map is from 1885. The intervals between new map editions for a town or city varied according to the demand dictated by insurance companies, and was based upon the pace and scale of the area’s urban growth. Editions appeared from every few years to more than five years. As the company conducted resurveys of cities, updates were printed, and correction slips were pasted in map books at a price per one hundred corrections. This was the job of the map corrector or “paster.”
You can imagine as work continued pasting new information over the old, many versions of the maps came to exist. By the 1950s, insurance companies stopped using the maps for underwriting and the business declined. The last new map was created in 1961. Fortunately, some found their way to archives and museums and digital versions are now available to view. For researchers, the dating of map editions is complicated, especially for books in use after the 1920s due to the method of pasting new information verses publishing new books. Still, public historians find the old maps an invaluable tool for documenting changes in the built environment over slices of time. The fire insurance maps are distinctive because they used a sophisticated set of symbols. Knowledge of the symbolic keys and colors is essential to quickly conveying structural information. For example, brick and tile are represented with a reddish/pink color. The use of yellow indicates frame, or wood, structures. Basic abbreviations were also used to convey other information, for example, S = store, D = dwelling. The images shown here are Julia Wolfe’s Old Kentucky Home, in yellow, over several map editions. Herbert Weber would have no need to correct the map showing the house at 48 Spruce Street in 1928. Nothing had changed since 1916.
For more information and to check the availability of other digitized Sanborn maps, check out: https://www.loc.gov/collections/sanborn-maps/about-this-collection/ and https://web.lib.unc.edu/nc-maps/sanborn.php
