1906 Fire Insurance Maps and Atlas of New Bedford, Massachusetts: The Complete Sanborn Fire Insurance Atlas of New Bedford, Massachusetts, the Whaling City on the Acushnet River, Including Fairhaven

Facsimile of the 1906 Sanborn fire-insurance atlas of New Bedford, Massachusetts, reproduced in full color from the Library of Congress copy. It covers the whole city of 75,000 people and the town of Fairhaven across the harbor, from the wharves, banks and stores of Water, Union and Purchase Streets and the Custom House, through the cotton mills along the Acushnet River and Clark's Cove, to the residential streets of the West End and the villages of Acushnet, Padanaram and Smith Mills.

The one hundred nine numbered sheets work block by block from the wharves, banks, stores, hotels and theatres along Water Street, Union Street, William Street, Purchase Street and Acushnet Avenue - the U. S. Post Office and Custom House, the County Court offices, the City Hall, the Armory, the Merchants Bank Building, the Institution for Savings, the Odd Fellows, Corson, Merrill's, Slocum and Wamsutta blocks and the Waite Buildings, the New Bedford, Savoy and Hathaway theatres, the Mansion House, the Parker House, the American, Central, Dartmouth, Glenworth, Plymouth and Union Square hotels, the Mariners Home and Seamen's Bethel and the Y. M. C. A. - through Central, City, Merrill's, Rotch's and Steamboat wharves, the New York, New Haven & Hartford station, freight house and round house, the Old Colony Steamship freight house, the Union Street Railway car houses and power house, the City marine railway, the coal wharf and oil storage on Fish Island, the Wamsutta, Potomska, Acushnet, Grinnell, Butler, Beacon, Soule, Kilburn, Whitman, Goswold and Dartmouth cotton mills, the City, Bristol, Hathaway, Pierce and Weeden manufacturing corporations, the Pairpoint Corporation, the New England Cotton Yarn Company, the Oneco Woolen Mills, the Johnson & Barbour silk mill, the Cornell Stocking Corporation, the New Bedford Cordage Company, the Taunton-New Bedford Copper Company, the Morse Twist Drill & Machine Company, the Atlas Tack Company, the Acushnet and Fairhaven iron foundries, the boiler works, the Blackmer, Diamond and Thatcher cut-glass works, the Robinson and Young & Kimball oil and candle works, the Snell & Simpson cracker factory, the Dawson and Smith Bros. breweries, the gas and Edison electric works and the water works, to St. Luke's and St. Joseph's hospitals, St. Mary's Orphan Home, the High School, the Textile School, Friends Academy, the grammar and public schools, St. Anthony's, St. Hyacinthe's, St. James', St. Lawrence's and Mount Carmel Catholic churches, the Protestant churches of every denomination and the Howland Street Synagogue, the Rural and Oak Grove cemeteries, and the residential streets of the city and of Fairhaven with its Town Hall, High School and Millicent Library, Acushnet Village, Padanaram and Smith Mills.

In 1906 the Sanborn Map Company of New York surveyed New Bedford for the fire-insurance trade, drawing the city at fifty feet to the inch. Every building is shown to scale and color-coded for construction (yellow for frame, pink for brick, blue for stone), with heights, uses, windows, party walls, hydrants, water mains and fire stations all marked. The index lists every street and every named business, church, school, hotel, mill and works with the sheet it appears on, and the key map places the colored sheet grid over the whole city.

This Exile Books edition is an unabridged facsimile republication of the atlas: the title sheet, the index, the key map and all one hundred nine numbered map sheets together with the six skeleton sheets, printed at 8.5 x 11 inches on premium color paper. Ideal for local historians, genealogists, architects, preservationists and anyone tracing a New Bedford address back to 1906.

The Sanborn Map Company of New York, founded by D. A. Sanborn in 1867 and by the 1900s headquartered at 11 Broadway, surveyed thousands of American cities for the fire-insurance trade. Its large-scale plans record every building's footprint, construction, height and use, and remain the most detailed record of the early twentieth-century American city.