University Daily Kansan / Wednesday, November 5, 1986
19
Collection helps map history
Bv CATHY EVANS
Special to the Kansan
History is often recorded in unusual and sometimes unintentional ways.
In Kansas, much of the architectural and business history in hundreds of cities and towns would have gone unrecorded if a Massachusetts surveyor and entrepreneur hadn't ventured into the fire insurance map business in 1867.
After starting with a map sold to insurance companies in Boston, D.A. Sanborn went on to form a company that eventually would make detailed maps of cities in all 50 states, Canada and Mexico.
Several of the 7,911 maps Sanborn's company did of Kansas cities and towns are on display at Spencer Research Library in the Kansas Collection lobby.
The Kansas Collection displays are changed periodically, said John Mark Lambertson, manuscript specialist for the collection. The Sanborn map display will be up until the end of the year, he said.
The maps, originally used by insurance companies to identify buildings under their coverage, are very detailed, showing floor plans and types of construction materials
in each building, thickness of fire walls, location and size of water pipes and location of flammable materials.
The maps also indicate the type of business in each building. Sanb昂 maps covered 243 Kansas towns and date from 1884 to 1943. Lambertson said.
Sanborn's company updated the maps every five to 10 years. Because of this, physical changes within a city over time can be seen by comparing maps from various periods. Lambertson said.
Two maps of Junction City, one done in 1905, the other in 1925, are included in the display. On the 1905 map, one downtown building is a meat market. By 1925, the same building is used as a movie theater.
A livery and feed building on the 1905 map completely disappeared by 1925.
1929. Careful examination of the maps can lead to detection of disasters, such as fires and floods, because large blocks of buildings were wiped out and rebuilt.
"They really give you a rich picture of the development of an area, especially when you put them in conjunction with city directories, photographs and newspapers."
The maps were an important tool in identifying and dating the library's collection of photographs of buildings in Anthony, Lambertson said.
Lambertson said.
The Kansas Collection was fortunate to get an entire set of the Kansas maps from the Library of Congress in Washington, D.C., which donated extra sets to various places, he said.
According to a Library of Congress publication, the Sanborn Map Company, which virtually monopolized the insurance map sheet by 1920, issued 700,000 maps sheets for more than 12,000 towns and cities in the United States.
In recent years, however, the maps have become obsolete in the insurance industry. The company has made no new maps since 1961.
Displays at the Kansas Collection always feature materials from the collection, which includes books, photographs, serials, manuscripts and maps on Kansas and the surrounding states. Another current display, "Building Kansas City's Union Station," features photographs.
The collection is open to the public
Report stresses broad education
United Press International
WASHINGTON - Reforms proposed in a new report on the state of undergraduate college education may help to undercut specialized "careerism" that dominates higher education, Ernest L. Boyer, the report's author, said yesterday.
The report, released Saturday, was critical of college educations that stress narrow specialization to advance economic careers at the expense of a broad-based humanities education.
Boyer, president of the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching, told a news conference the suggested changes in the 241-page report released Saturday were "in a sense a reform deferred" because the confrontations of the 1960s and the cutbacks of the 1970s had sidetracked the issue.
Boyer said he believed the most important reform was what the report described as an "enriched major," in which a student would not only explore a field in depth, but also put the specialized field in perspective.
it also put the specimen in place. He said that there was a great deal of tension among
students and teachers, pitting general education against the specialized study of a major.
Boyer said he strongly supported the idea that each graduating write and defend a senior thesis, part of which would be to demonstrate how the major related to other fields of study and what effect it might have on contemporary life.
Boyer said students who would graduate if all of the report's reforms were in place would have a better perspective than those who graduate now.
Other reforms called for by the report included development of an integrated core curriculum that "introduces a student to essential knowledge, to connections across disciplines and, in the end, to the application of life beyond the campus."
Boyer also said intercollegiate sports had a negative role in education, despite the small number of schools that actually abused the system.
He criticized the "craze to gain visibility and lots of money" by some colleges through their sports programs, saying they were. "after all, only a farm club for the pros anyway."
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