Fire Insurance Records and the Architectural Historian

One of the largest bodies of descriptive information about the American built environment lies hidden in fire insurance records, especially those from the late eighteenth through the early twentieth centuries. Insurance companies faced a universal need to describe the properties they insured for reasons related to the proper management of their businesses, recording these "risks" in written volumes called policy registers and daily reports and in graphic documents known as insurance surveys. Local insurance agents also kept their own policy registers and sometimes copies of the surveys they produced for the insurance companies. As this case study of research from New Jersey indicates, architectural historians who actively search for surviving collections of fire insurance records will find tremendous reward for their efforts, especially in the discovery of vernacular buildings and landscapes.