1912 Fire Insurance Maps and Atlas of Bakersfield, California: The Complete Sanborn Fire Insurance Atlas of Bakersfield, California, the Kern County Seat on the Kern River, with the East Side

Facsimile of the 1912 Sanborn fire-insurance atlas of Bakersfield, California, reproduced in full color from the Library of Congress copy. It covers the whole city of 18,000 people, from the hotels, banks and business blocks of Chester Avenue and Nineteenth Street, the Court House and Hall of Records, through the Santa Fe yards and the Kern River Mills on the Kern Island Canal, across Union Avenue to the Southern Pacific depot, yards and shops and the residential streets of the east side along the East Side Canal.

The seventy numbered sheets work block by block from the stores, banks, hotels and theatres along Chester Avenue, Nineteenth Street, Twentieth Street, I Street and Truxtun Avenue - the new County Court House and the old, the County Jail, the Hall of Records, the Post Offices, the Public Library, the Oil Exchange Block, the Masonic Temple, the Hopkins, F. O. E. and Pacific Telephone and Telegraph buildings, the Scribner and Bakersfield opera houses, Parra's Theatre and the Airdome, the Southern Hotel and Annex, the Arlington, Commercial, Grand, Massena, New Walters, Russ, Metropole and National hotels and the Manley Apartments - through the Atchison, Topeka & Santa Fe freight house, passenger station, yards and round house, the Southern Pacific passenger depot, railroad offices, freight houses, yards and shops, the Harvey System eating house, the Kern County Land Company's Kern River Mills, warehouses, shops and Kern Island Ranch headquarters, the San Joaquin Light and Power Company's power house on the Kern Island Canal, the gas plant, the water companies' pumping stations, the Bakersfield and Maier breweries, the bottling works, the Union and Valley ice companies, the Kern County Creamery, the Bakersfield Iron Works, the Consolidated Pipe Company, Standard Oil and the oil-well supply houses, the Bakersfield Sandstone Brick Company, the Bakersfield Unit Brick and Tile Company, the Bakersfield, King and Union lumber companies and the laundries, to the Kern County Hospital, the San Joaquin, Mercy, St. Francis and Railroad hospitals, the Kern County Children's Shelter, the Kern County High School with its farm buildings and Manual Arts Building, the Bryant, Beale Street, Hawthorne, Tenth Street and Washington schools, St. Francis and St. Joseph's Roman Catholic churches, the Episcopal, Methodist, Congregational, Baptist, Lutheran, Christian Science, Nazarene, African Methodist and Mt. Zion Baptist churches, the Armory Hall, the Salvation Army, the Woman's Club, Kern Athletic Park, and the residential streets out to the Kern River and the east side beyond Union Avenue.

In 1912 the Sanborn Map Company of New York surveyed Bakersfield 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 report with the block index, the key map and all seventy numbered map sheets, 1 to 70, printed at 8.5 x 11 inches on premium color paper. Ideal for local historians, genealogists, architects, preservationists and anyone tracing a Bakersfield address back to 1912.

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.