As with many interesting products of material culture, Sanborn Fire Insurance maps found themselves a new life as generations of historians, architects, and planners have rediscovered them over the years. The maps were originally created for insurance underwriters in the middle of the nineteenth century, and by World War II, the company had surveyed over 13,000 towns in the United States. This particular collection comes from the Digital Collections division of the University of South Carolina Libraries and includes some 580 maps of various cities in the state. Using the search engine, visitors can look for maps by city, year of publication, or county. One particular interesting wrinkle of the collection is that there are 232 previously unpublished maps included in this digital collection.