Location, location, location

How do authors write about a place they’ve never been to — and make it seem real?

It’s a tricky problem, right? Because it’s easy to see on a map that, for example, Route 35 and East Lincolnway bisect La Porte, Indiana, and that many streets in the downtown grid are named after presidents.

But can Google Maps really give you a sense of the character of a Midwestern town you’ve never stepped foot in? And — now here’s the sticking point — what about what La Porte was like in, say, 1890? Most of the roads on any modern map weren’t even built then.

When I started out writing Belle, this was one of the questions I had to wrestle with early on. Some authors are lucky enough to have the resources and time to make scouting visits to locales they want to set a novel in. What better way to really learn about a place than to go there, right?

But for Belle, I didn’t have the time or the budget for a field trip.

Of course, it’s much easier for modern authors than it was in pre-internet days, or even post-internet but before Google Earth and Google Maps street view. I find that you can get a pretty good feel for a place by diving down into that level and moving around as if you were driving a car through those streets. Obviously, that only works for places that Google Maps covers — not the wild spaces.

But I still needed to solve the problem of what La Porte was like more than a hundred years ago.

Sanborn fire insurance maps

Enter Sanborn fire insurance maps, which I managed to stumble upon pretty early in my writing and research process.

Insurance has a surprisingly long history, with several laws in the Code of Hammurabi stipulating terms of liability, responsibility, and financial protection. And the first fire insurance company was started in Hamburg in 1676.

In the 1700s, after the Great Fire of London in 1666, fire insurance grew into a bonafide industry. In the beginning, companies had their own fire departments and would issue metal plaques to their customers. The plaques would be affixed to the exterior of the building to indicate which properties were insured and by which companies. In Colonial America, Ben Franklin founded a fire insurance company that would refuse to insure buildings deemed too high of a fire risk, for example, if they were built of wood.

In the post-Civil War era, Daniel Sanborn began creating detailed maps to determine fire risk of buildings in a particular area. In the early history of insurance, insurers would visit every property to be covered. Of course, eventually this became impractical, and the maps made it possible to determine the fire risk of a building remotely.

The maps were large scale (50 feet to 1 inch), and it would take several maps, which were bound in volumes, to thoroughly map a town. Larger cities and towns would need multiple volumes. These volumes were well organized, making it easy to understand the physical relationships between areas covered from one map to another. Every map collection contained a beautifully drawn cover map showing the whole municipality and color coded and numbered to indicate what section of the town the more detailed maps covered. The cover map included an index and a key, and this 1890 La Porte map has a testimonial from La Porte’s local board that’s signed by the members.

Sanborn Map Company cover map for La Porte, Indiana. Published February 1890. Credit: Library of Congress

Information shown on these incredibly detailed maps included outlines of every building, locations of doors and windows, what materials a building was built of, number of floors, property boundaries, and the purpose of the building. They showed the town’s population, prevailing winds, and the location of water facilities, sprinkler systems, fire hydrants, plus what equipment the municipality’s fire department possessed.

The maps also showed street names, railroad corridors, and natural features like lakes and rivers. Color coding indicated framing materials, for example, red for brick, blue for stone, gray for iron. Was there a steam boiler? The map would tell you that. Was the roof slate or shingle? The map would tell you that.

Maps were continually updated, with new volumes being released and minor updates added to volumes betweentimes. Employees would travel to locations that subscribed to the maps and paste the update over the original.

The Sanborn company grew to be quite large, a monopoly in fact, and it was in business until well into the 20th century. Originally lithographed on paper, eventually the maps were published on microfilm.

Because they cover so many municipalities — 12,000 US cities and towns — and record such a long period of time and all the changes that occurred in that time, the Sanborn Fire Maps are a treasure trove of historical detail.

Cross-referencing with Google Maps

Because many La Porte roads put in prior to 1890 exist with the same names today, it was easy to compare 1890 La Porte with the La Porte of today.

It’s known that Belle Gunness’s property was on McClung Road (although it is long gone now), and that area would have been fairly rural at that time. As such, it was not included on the Sanborn map. However, McClung Road still exists and runs northwest to southeast on the eastern side of Clear Lake, intersecting with Park Street, which leads into the La Porte’s downtown

In this way, I could see how my Belle would travel to town and what buildings she would have seen. From the wealth of detail about the buildings — the types of businesses, their names, where they stood in relation to each other — I gained a valuable understanding of La Porte in 1890.

I knew what businesses she could have visited. I knew there was a gas works, a woolen mill, feed mill, furniture factory, foundry, wheel works. I knew where the city hall and the jail were. The Sanborn maps showed me that La Porte in 1890 was a thriving city of almost 10,000 people, and businesses that I saw on the Sanborn map of La Porte that made an appearance in Belle include a laundry, a confectioner’s, a livery, a lumber mill, and a mercantile.

Now, this isn’t to say that everything in Belle is in the same location as the Sanborn map showed. Not at all. Because Belle is fiction, I had a lot of creative license to put things where I needed them to be. But the foundation for all of it was what I learned from real-life sources like the Sanborn maps.