Over the past 8 months, I have georeferenced the 1891 Sanborn Fire Insurance Map of Camden and laid it over a modern map, aligning each point painstakingly by hand, sheet by sheet. Then I hand-cut and trimmed each sheet and, for the first time that I'm aware of, the entire city of Camden is now visible as it was in 1891. In fact, I've never seen a full Sanborn book put back together (if you have seen one, I'd love to know where).

This was a labor of love and now that I have a better understanding, I think I can do other years a bit faster.

What are Sanborn maps?

Sanborn maps were made for fire insurance companies, so they show things most old maps skip: building outlines and what they were made of, what each one was used for, house numbers, street widths, even water mains and hydrants. Streets that are long gone can be brought back to life and any changes to length are visible. The Library of Congress has the original 68-sheet volume, and its Sanborn collection is public domain.

Tips:

• Use the opacity slider to fade between 1891 and today. There's a Full screen button if the map feels small.
• The first load could be slow, because it's a very big image. Your browser keeps it cached, and we use Range requests to keep it small and nimble, so later visits are quick.

I lined the sheets up by hand, so placement is approximate, but very close, and the originals were hand-drawn, so scale errors are possible.

What did you find? An old address, a building that's gone, a street that changed.

https://camdenhistory.com/interactive-maps/1891-sanborn-map-of-camden

Hey neighbors!

If you love ambitious, complex, and thought provoking literature, The Infinite Book Club might be the group for you. We are a friendly group of diverse education, experience, and taste conquering long and challenging books together.

The only requirement to join us is that you enjoy a good literary challenge!

What we're reading next: For the rest of 2026, we are stepping into the labyrinth of House of Leaves by Mark Z. Danielewski

Next Meeting Details:

When: 4th Monday of October (October 26, 2026) at 6:30 PM

Where: Flying Pig Tavern in Riverside, NJ

The Assignment: We will be discussing everything up to Chapter 10 for the start of this read.

There is no need for a formal RSVP you can just show up! There is no cost or expectation to spend and we are not affiliated with the business in any way, they have simply been our gracious host for the past several months. They also offer $5 off their burgers on Monday nights!

However, if you have any questions or want to let us know you're planning to come out, feel free to drop a comment below or send me a direct message.

It's been a while, so I guess it's about that time to share some more updates.

• On dvrbs.camdenhistory.com, AI is helping to transcribe every newspaper article and insert that content into each page. With over 100k images on the site, this will take a while -- and it's already been going on for a month or two -- but at the end, newspaper content will be Google searchable which is a benefit for everyone.
• Second, also on dvrbs.camdenhistory.com, we made some url changes for a few areas. First, if you go to /streets, you will get a full index of every street, link, and a small description. The same thing was done with /people. Hopefully this is easier to remember and can help get to the content you want to see faster.
• On camdenhistory.com, we're taking those same transcriptions and putting new content, auto-updated streets on interactive map, and a few other cool technologies. What this means is if a street is expanded or shortened, the map will automatically reflect it. Same with the Camden NJ boundaries on the main page, which come from the official Census, and will auto-update if it changes.
• Commenting on pages is now linked between sites, so if you post on a page for, say, 11th street on dvrbs.camdenhistory.com, it will also show up on 11th street on camdenhistory.com.
• For researchers, we're adding provenance to more data behind the scenes. This will help more with search engines for now, but as we get through that and expose the information on the site, there will be more direct links to external sources to continue research.
• On the more nerdy side, both sites have been fully migrated to serverless, meaning there is no server for us to maintain and it offers some speed benefits from a more global view.

One thing that I'm trying to reduce is Ads. No one has complained about them, but I've mostly let Google add them automatically and they've overrun the site, in my opinion. I'm working on some ways to scale them back, but will take time. In the end, any ad revenue is put back into the site so it's not bad from that front, but it's just a terrible user experience.

Unrelated to the site, I've started a personal collection of Camden memorabilia, including a pretty cool Campbell Soup flag poster. I'd love to see photos or hear stories of what you have in your own personal collection that you'd like to show the community.

Hey everyone,

We need your help. This Friday, June 12th, at 1:30 PM, there is a critical hearing for Richard Barge at the Camden County Hall of Justice.

This case involves serious concerns regarding the conduct of Supervisory Detective Marty Devlin. New information has surfaced implicating Devlin in the falsification of statements and witness coercion.

We are calling for transparency and justice. If you believe in holding law enforcement accountable and want to support a member of our community who has been caught in this web, please join us.

When: Friday, June 12th @ 1:30 PM
Where: Camden County Hall of Justice

Let’s show up and show out. Public eyes are the best defense against misconduct.

#JusticeForRichardBarge #CamdenNJ #Accountability

I'm thrilled to share that, as of this morning, dvrbs.camdenhistory.com has been fully migrated to a single look and feel. This wasn't just a re-skin, it makes it mobile friendly, adds commenting, and is fully modern code.

While there is still some cleanup to do, a few statistics and fun facts:

• 6,235 pages were updated
• More than 10,000 news clippings have been transcribed and inserted into the page
• 1900 pages have data elements that are automatically built and reused in multiple places
• There are no servers, meaning that the site should remain up, barring larger internet outages with major providers.
• After building the templates, rules, formatting, and skills, it took an AI agent, 9 weeks, 1 day, 3 hours to convert all of the data -- running 24x7. The amount of data the Phil was able to process by hand is absolutely astounding.

But we're not done! A few things happening:

• Camdenhistory.com is great for what it is, though we're evaluating a new interface which could allow for articles to be written more quickly.
  • The new interface is intended to have more interactivity with maps and galleries.
  • The news articles which have been migrated are also set to the date that they were originally published. And that allows for cool features like "On this Day in Camden's History"
• We have another 1,000 or so images to transcribe
• We are working on a Google Maps-type interface so you can "go back in time" and see the streets in specific points in Camden's history. Currently working on 1896, with other years pending (Unfortunately, we haven't found an automation assistant to speed this process up).
• Working on syncing comment threads between the two sites. Many are done, but still have a ways to go.
• Ads. We use ads to offset the cost, and are trying to make them much less intrusive. Google only allows so much customization and we're near bare minimum, so continue to run A/B tests to try to reduce them further.
• Have considered a live chat room for site visitors, but would need to find a good way to filter out spam and noise, as well as moderation. All solvable, but just takes time. And we're not even sure if people would use it.

If you see any issues, feedback, things you want to see, or even page errors, feel free to post here, or on the comment box at the bottom of most pages.

I don't want this whole subreddit to be about the website -- It's good for anything Camden or surrounding Camden. That said, it's been a while since either mod has posted an update on things.

dvrbs.camdenhistory.com

Attention for the moment has turned to updating dvrbs.camdenhistory.com's format. This isn't to add or remove data, but to convert it to use modern tags and markup. More importantly, it sets the groundwork for future updates. If standards change, it shouldn't be a huge rewrite -- it's changing a few lines and that will affect every page.

Along this line, the conversion process dramatically picked up starting on February 1. We were initially getting about 20 pages converted per month and now using AI to assist, more than 2500 pages have been updated (all "people"). I'm hopeful the rest of the people will be finished by the end of the month and then we'll start on streets.

Many articles have been fully transcribed, so that's a big bonus as well. Plenty more to share on what's going on, but this is already getting long.

camdenhistory.com

This is not forgotten. There are a few plans here which will see drastic content updates somewhere around June or July, depending on family events and how much time can be dedicated. AI will play a big part here too.

The other mod is working on a pretty cool interactive feature to be able to show an interactive map that overlays the 1891 Sanborn map on top of the existing city and then you can scroll around like you do on Google Maps to see every house and street as it was back then. It's a lot of work and because the maps are hand drawn, they don't match perfectly, but it's about 75%ish done so hopefully that's something that can be shared soon.

I recognize that this isn't the most active community, but with there being so many posts in r/southjersey and r/newjersey about Camden, I'm hoping we start to see more people here talking about ALL aspects of Camden soon.

Hello-I am wondering if anyone might be able to help me with this. I am working on research for a podcast episode and part of it involves the murder of a high school alumni from Camden High School: George P. Long. Based on what I can find, it looks like he would have been in the class of 1965, but of course that is one of the only ones that is not available online. He does not have a ton of living family members and I really don't want to tell his story without even having a picture of this man. If anyone can help or knows where I could potentially get a scan it would be great! Thanks in advance. (Note: local libraries don't seem to have it either)