Nashville History Club meeting: Sanborn Fire Insurance Maps

The Nashville History Club meets again on Tuesday, October 20, at the Sevier Park Regional Community Center, with Phil Thomason presenting Sanborn Fire Insurance Maps. If you've never come across them, Sanborn maps are a researcher's goldmine: highly detailed, color-coded insurance maps of American cities from the late 19th and early 20th centuries. They show building footprints, construction materials, and window placements, giving you a street-by-street look at what Nashville actually looked like before the wrecking ball and the high-rises took over.

Thomason's presentation fits right into the club's regular rhythm. The Nashville History Club meets every Tuesday afternoon, and each session is dedicated to a different facet of the city's past. They bring in authors and historians to speak on a wide range of subjects—sports, historic neighborhoods, the Civil Rights movement, the Mississippians, wartime, and early American settlers. It's a broad tent, and the maps session is a good example of how they approach the city's history: starting with a specific tool and working out from there to see what it reveals about the place.

If you're used to the club meeting at Fort Negley Park, there's a temporary change you'll want to keep in mind. The meetings have moved to the Sevier Park Regional Community Center while construction continues at Fort Negley, so make sure you're heading to the right spot. And if you can't make this one, recordings of past presentations are available on YouTube, so you can catch up on the sessions you've missed.

The meeting runs from 1 PM to 2 PM at the Sevier Park Regional Community Center, 3021 Lealand Ln, Nashville, TN 37204. It's a Tuesday afternoon, an hour long, with Phil Thomason leading the conversation on Sanborn maps.