Winston-Salem Sanborn Maps Online

In response to the lopsided victory in favor of the Camel City in the Sanborn map vote a few weeks ago, we’ve begun to add maps of Winston-Salem to the Sanborn Fire Insurance Map section of North Carolina Maps.

The first set of maps is from 1885, back before the cities were formally joined and were still known as Winston and Salem. I knew this was a tobacco town, but I had no idea of the extent to which the industry dominated the city. In the brief directory on the first page of the 1885 map I counted twenty-five different tobacco factories, all located within a few blocks of each other. And that’s just the factories — there were also tobacco warehouses, tobacco prizing houses, and at least one cigar factory. All this in two communities whose combined population was just 8,000. Was there any place in the United States — or in the world, for that matter — where it was easier to get a smoke?

Detail from page one of the 1885 Winston and Salem Sanborn Map

Two New Georeferenced Maps Online

There are two fun, new georeferenced maps on the NC Maps site that we wanted to share.

The first is a map of the Battle of Bentonville from the Official Atlas of the Civil War.  The map is accurate enough, and the satellite image good enough, to be able to see how the landscape shaped the battle.

The other one is a map of the golf course and racetrack at Pinehurst Country Club in 1922.  Many of the holes line up pretty well, showing where things have changed, and where they haven’t.

We’ve got a postcard of a country club in Pinehurst, dating to ca. 1915-1930.  It’s unclear whether this image is the same country club in the map above, but the footprint of the clubhouse on the map looks like it could possibly be the same one in the postcard below.