1927 Fire Insurance Maps and Atlas of Elkhart, Indiana: The Complete Sanborn Fire Insurance Atlas of Elkhart, Indiana, the Band Instrument City on the St. Joseph and Elkhart Rivers, with Island Park

Facsimile of the 1927 Sanborn fire-insurance atlas of Elkhart, Indiana, reproduced in full color from the Library of Congress copy. It covers the whole city of 35,000 people, from the stores, banks, hotels and theatres of Main Street between the St. Joseph and Elkhart Rivers, through the New York Central yards and shops and the band-instrument, medicine, paper and motor-car works, to the residential streets of Beardsley's additions, North, East and West Elkhart, Island Park and Christiana Creek.

The eighty numbered sheets work block by block from the stores, banks, hotels and theatres along Main Street, Second Street, Franklin Street, Jackson Street, Lexington Avenue and Marion Street - the Municipal Building and City Offices, the Post Office, the Public Library, the Police Station, the Central Fire Station, the Telephone Exchange, the Masonic Temple, the B. P. O. E., F. O. E. and Salvation Army halls, the Y. M. C. A. and Y. W. C. A., the Monger and Hayne buildings, the Bucklen and Lerner theatres, the Hotel Bucklen, the Hotel Elkhart, the Harris, Read and Truex hotels and the New Tyler Hotel - through the New York Central depots, round house, power house and shops, the C. C. C. & St. L. depot and round house, the Y. M. C. A. Railroad Branch, the Indiana and Michigan Electric Company's power house, the C. G. Conn instrument works, the Buescher, Martin and Elkhart band-instrument companies and the Pedler instrument works, the Miles Medical Company's factory and warehouses, the American Coating Mills, the Lincoln Paper Mills, the Elcar, Century and Valley motor companies, the Chicago Hardware Foundry, the Elkhart Brass, Bridge and Iron, Rubber, Packing, Fibre Furniture and Enamel Paint works, the Inner Braced Furniture Company, the Sidway-Topliff metal-toy works, the Noyes carriage works, the Northern Indiana Brass Works, the Indiana Aluminum Ware Company, the Weis steel-door works, the Godfrey Conveyer Company, the Gossard corset factory, the Master Lock and Absolut Con-Tac-Tor plants, the Barger paper-box factory, the Wilson shirt factory, the Pancost and Payton mills, the Furnas ice-cream factory, the Sunlight Baking Company, the Standard Oil and Sinclair Refining depots, the coal, lumber and ice yards and the Water Works, to the Elkhart General Hospital, the Elkhart High School and the Samuel Strong, Beardsley, Middlebury, Rice, Roosevelt, Weston, Willowdale and South Side schools, St. Vincent's Catholic Church and School, St. John's Episcopal, Trinity Methodist, the Lutheran, Evangelical, Brethren, Mennonite and Nazarene churches, Island Park and the Christiana Country Club, and the residential streets of Beardsley's additions, North, East and West Elkhart, Studebaker's additions, Kenwood and Greenleaf Park.

In 1927 the Sanborn Map Company of New York surveyed Elkhart for the fire-insurance trade, drawing the business district and most of the city at fifty feet to the inch and several outlying residential additions at one hundred 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 eighty numbered map sheets, printed at 8.5 x 11 inches on premium color paper. Ideal for local historians, genealogists, architects, preservationists and anyone tracing a Elkhart address back to 1927.

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.