1920 Fire Insurance Maps and Atlas of Portsmouth, New Hampshire: The Complete Sanborn Fire Insurance Atlas of Portsmouth, New Hampshire, with New ... Rye Beach and North Hampton on the Seacoast

Facsimile of the 1920 Sanborn fire-insurance atlas of Portsmouth, New Hampshire, reproduced in full color from the Library of Congress copy. It covers the whole city on the Piscataqua, from Market Square and the wharves through Christian Shore, Atlantic Heights and the Atlantic Corporation ship yard, together with the seacoast towns of New Castle, Rye and North Hampton - the Wentworth Hotel, Rye Centre, Straws Point, Wallis Sands, Rye Beach and Little Boars Head.

The fifty numbered sheets work block by block from the stores, banks, hotels and theatres around Market Square and along Congress, State, Daniel, Pleasant, Islington and Middle Streets - the Custom House, the Post Office, the County Court House and Jail, the City Hall, the Portsmouth Athenaeum, the Public Library, the Thomas Bailey Aldrich Association Building, the Portsmouth Savings Bank building, the Congress and Franklin blocks, the Colonial, Olympia and Portsmouth theatres, the Rockingham and Kearsarge hotels, Hotel DeWitt, and the Y. M. C. A. - through the Boston & Maine depots and round house, Long, Russell's and Appledorf wharves, the Portsmouth Electric Railway car barn, the Portsmouth Gas Company, the Frank Jones Brewing Company and the Portsmouth Brewery Company, the Gale Shoe Manufacturing Company, the Kraus-Millett Leather Company's chrome calf-skin tannery, the Vickery leather tannery, the Morley Button Manufacturing Company, the Portsmouth Foundry Company, the Margeson furniture works, the Littlefield Lumber Company and the Sugden Bros. saw and planing mill, the Consolidated Coal Company's coal pockets, the Newicks ice houses, the Standard Oil and Texas Company plants, the Atlantic Corporation ship yard and the streets of Atlantic Heights, to the Portsmouth Hospital, the High School, the Farragut, Haven, LaFayette, Spalding and Whipple schools, the North Congregational Church on Market Square, the South Church, Christ Church and St. John's Episcopal Church, the Church of the Immaculate Conception, the Baptist, Methodist and Universalist churches, the synagogue on State Street, the Portsmouth Yacht Club, and the residential streets of Christian Shore and Noble's Island - and out along the seacoast to the town of New Castle with the Wentworth Hotel, the Ledges and the government buildings and military posts at Fort Constitution, to Rye Centre, the Coast Guard stations, the Western Union cable office, the Ocean Wave House, Wallis Sands, Jenness Beach, the Farragut House, Drake House and St. Andrew's-by-the-Sea at Rye Beach, the Abanaqua Golf Club, and the summer cottages of North Hampton and Little Boars Head, each owner named.

In 1920 the Sanborn Map Company of New York surveyed Portsmouth 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 map of the congested district, the key map and all fifty numbered map sheets together with the two skeleton sheets, printed at 8.5 x 11 inches on premium color paper. Ideal for local historians, genealogists, architects, preservationists and anyone tracing a Portsmouth address back to 1920.

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.