In your idyllic childhood, you lived in the third house from the corner of Main and Pine in a little town in Missouri, or Kansas or anywhere else in the country. You’re nostalgic for the home place. Is the house still there?

Before the age of digitization, finding your old neighborhood would have been a monumental task. Now, you can go to a computer at any Springfield-Greene County Library, access a digital product and find a large-scale historical map that will show you a “footprint or outline of the buildings and houses in more than 12,000 American towns and cities,” said Michael Glenn, the local history librarian at the Library Center. “This is an amazing resource for our patrons.”

Digital Sanborn Maps, dating from 1867 to 1970, are a boon to historians and genealogists, as well as demographers who can chart population shifts and changes in density, environmentalists who can use the data to support studies and disputes and geographers, economists and others who can study the development and movement of industry and commerce in urban areas.

For the rest of us, it’s just plain fun to browse these maps and pinpoint streets, landmarks, parks and monuments and remember the good ‘ole days. Each of the 660,000 maps show the industrial, commercial and residential sections of cities in the U.S.

The company wasn’t always digital. D. A. Sanborn founded the company in 1867, becoming the primary American publisher of printed fire insurance maps for nearly 100 years. The maps, created to help fire insurance companies assess the risk associated with insuring a particular property, list street blocks, original and succeeding building numbers in commercial and residential areas, even details such as building materials and dates of construction.  

The digital maps are large-scale plans drawn at a scale of 50 feet to an inch. You can manipulate the maps online, magnify and zoom in on specific sections and layer maps from different years. The maps can be printed or downloaded.

To access Digital Sanborn Maps, go to thelibrary.org, select Local History, then Online Resources. You'll find Sanborn Maps in the list of databases.

If you have a valid Springfield-Greene County Library card, you can also use the product from your home computer.

Jeanne C. Duffey, community relations director for the Springfield-Greene County Library District, can be reached at jeanned@thelibrary.org.