The “Batavia Maps” project refers to an initiative to restore the only set of pre-World War II Sanborn wall maps of historic Batavia, Illinois, known to exist. Produced by the Sanborn Map Company of New York, these maps were created as a service to both insurance companies and communities nationwide as a tool to assess potential risk when community members insured their businesses against loss. The maps are at once remarkably accurate and artistic. They immediately engross the viewer in compelling details about the city as it was at the time of their production in 1907, and they invite questions about life then versus today.
The Sanborn Map Company was founded in 1866 as the D. A. Sanborn National Insurance Diagram Bureau. The company still exists today, and still creates fire insurance maps for the same purposes it did more than a century ago. Sanborn is now based in Colorado Springs, Colorado. For more information about the company, visit www.Sanborn.com.
In 2015, the Batavia Public Library Foundation established a drive to restore the maps so that they could become both a resource as well as a source of historic interest and public discussion in the community. As part of this initiative, the Foundation created this Web site to allow users, especially students, to dig deeper into locations shown on and various other aspects of the maps, and the history that is both inherent in them and suggested by them. It is the intent and hope of the Foundation that the information on these pages will be a helpful and engaging resource for years to come.