There is a repository of historic fire insurance maps containing information that could be vital to your current work especially if you work in commercial real estate, development, urban planning, or insurance. I am referring to the collection of fire insurance maps retained by and offered through EDR as the Certified Sanborn® Map Report. This is a collection containing the original fire insurance maps of American cities and towns drafted by the field survey crews of the Sanborn Map Company. Crews mapped as many as 12,000 American cities and towns starting from the late nineteenth century and well into the twentieth. They collected information critical to fire insurance underwriters. The fire underwriters needed to know information about the risk associated with the building in question, its’ use, nearby structures, occupancies of those structures, location of fire hydrants, and generally the surrounding area. They mapped areas at large scale to provide the rich details. They noted construction methods, type of building materials used, processes undertaken inside buildings, and storage. Because the Sanborn crews returned approximately every 10 years, the maps represent a long-term record of land usage. Today this information is useful to developers who want to know about hidden risks, land use planners seeking the history of a location and its’ previous uses, and environmental historians. EDR supplements the digital Sanborn map with a series of historic aerial images by decade, city directories, as well as USGS topographic maps. EDR certifies the package of maps and images as accurate to a set of standards so that the information is in a sense validated for any potential legal issues.