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Section Corner Marker
Posted by Kfcrowe on October 2, 2020 at 12:36 pmI recently purchased a house located near a section corner. For fun, I thought I??d look to see if I could find a section corner marker. Could not find one. Not sure if this is relevant, but the section corner is near railroad tracks. Do section corners typically have markers? Any advice on how to find it? What type of marker should I be looking for? Thanks.
Kfcrowe replied 3 years, 12 months ago 6 Members · 19 Replies -
19 Replies
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Your simple question has many unknowns that make a definitive answer impossible. A great number of items of different materials and sizes have been used as section corner monuments since the creation of the Public Land Survey System (PLSS). Finding a specific section corner monument may be as simple as looking at the ground/road surface in the exact right spot or it may involve a backhoe and numerous safety precautions to be in place. Depending on your exact location you may be able to contact a county employee, who may have the title of county surveyor or county engineer or road and bridge director, or if within city limits a city employee with a similar job title. In one location or the other they may have a description and reference notes that can be used to come up with a plan for searching——or not. In many States with PLSS corners there is a central repository for records on what type of monument was last reported as existing at that specific corner and what reference items and relative locations can be used to find it. In my State that happens to be the State Historical Society Department of Archives. Other States have very different practices/locations.
As to what item might have been used as the monument, it could be anything from a length of iron bar driven into the ground to a stone that was set well over 100 years ago prior to any kind of settlement and development of the surrounding area. It could also be an iron pipe, axle, railroad spike, cotton spindle, concrete nail, 60d nail, and many other ferrous items that will make a metal detector sing. Non-ferrous items include stones, brass disks mounted atop an aluminum pipe and wooden stakes. A high percentage of monuments set over the past 30 years or so may have a plastic or aluminum cap with identification information stenciled into it affixed to the top of the bar/pipe. Thus, the first thing you will see is a simple piece of plastic hiding the bar/pipe beneath it. In some areas a tag is wired or otherwise attached to the side of the bar/pipe to provide similar identification. Quite frequently in urban sites the corner may be an “X” or “+” chiseled/cut into a sidewalk or street surface.
Many bizarre items have been used as well. I once found a stone buried two feet deep in a county road with a large horseshoe straddling it so as to hold it together. A few miles from that location I found a chunk of a leaf spring from an automobile used as the section corner marker. A recent post on this site mentioned that a Government surveyor in the 1800’s in the Wyoming/Montana area had noted placing a pile of buffalo bones at one corner and two buffalo skulls at another. I can think of a corner where the monument is an “X” chiseled into the side of a boulder on a steep bluff that has been there since about 1875.
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Thanks for all the good information. If the section corner was on my property, I would dig around, but it??s not my land, so I??ll have to leave it. It was hard enough finding the 3/4 inch pipe corner marker on my lot, even with the survey plat in hand. Can??t start digging around for fun on what might be the railroad??s land. Thanks again.
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You are correct, don’t dig around on the railroad lands. In theory there are huge fines and penalties for even being inside RR property right of ways. In practice they will usually simply tell you to move on, but with a shovel and poking around, I will advise you not to do that.
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If you want to follow up with local officials, you might find some items that would be almost as interesting to look at as an actual marker. For example, here’s a corner certificate from Wisconsin. They may be somewhat different in your area.
At the bottom of this .pdf, it’s noted that a modern-day surveyor dug a hole 12 feet by 20 and eventually found an old wooden post, believed to mark the position of a corner set in 1852.
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I had to chuckle when I read the part about the setting of a 7/8″ by 60″ iron bar. But, since they had to dig down 42 inches to find the post, setting that beast was much easier than I envisioned at first.
I don’t know that I own an acre of ground here in Kansas where one would attempt to set a bar sixty inches long without expecting at least half of it sticking out above normal ground surface level. I have one 40-acre tract where we set steel posts at one rod spacing along one side. This was only possible through the use of a jackhammer with drill bit to make the hole for each post. The most dirt before hitting bedrock (limestone) was 14 inches. In several places we started drilling in the bedrock as there was no dirt. I will confess to owning one farm where I have no idea how deep it is to bedrock, but, it would be much more than 60 inches. That farm, however, is in Cimarron County, Oklahoma, home of the dust bowl in the Dirty 30’s.
The stubby little things in the foreground are fence posts. This famous photo was taken about ten miles from my farm.
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Coincidentally, I just saw that photo recently in “The Worst Hard Time” (very good book). Looks like that farm is close to what they called No Man’s Land. It’s amazing that anyone survived that time.
In Minnesota, of course, we have what might be called seasonal bedrock. It’s possible to spend an hour getting a 14 inch pipe driven flush in a frozen gravel road.
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Looking for that section corner was only a side expedition. What I am really trying to do is trace the ownership of my small lot from the original PLSS survey and land patent (1841, I think) to my deed, with all the intermediate transfers leading to the subdivision plat that created my lot.
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That can be fairly simple or horribly complicated to do for yourself depending on the practices in the courthouses in your home area. In my county we have all of the index books which makes that process relatively simple with a short amount of instruction. In other States you may be doomed to hire an abstractor to do that for you for a sizeable fee.
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In Iowa the owner used to get an Abstract of Title which went all the way back to the first patent from the government. It was exactly what you are looking for. We have them for the pieces of my wife’s farm land.
But they got the rules changed, and now you get only the last patent or city subdivision and then it skips to 40 years of history. A crying shame, if you ask me. But no one asked me.
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I am in Illinois, and my title policy only went back as far as the creation of my small lot as part of the filing of the 1924 subdivision plat.
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Rural Illinois or urban? The smaller the population of the county, the easier it may be. Name a county and someone here can probably guide you through the process, but it may be Monday before you get a local response.
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I wouldn’t get too excited about finding it. In all the state I work in, IL is the most poorly marked and documented. If the Section Corner is in there “should” be a corner document on file in Waukegan at the Recorder’s office. And more than likely it will just be a plain ‘Ol Rebar with no cap. Lake County is pretty populated, so there should be recorded of its existence. Best chance of finding a section corner in IL is in the Central region.
What corner in particular are you looking for? I have a subscription to Hub Tack (on line service) and I can pull the Corner document for you if one does exist.
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@stlsurveyor
Twp 44N Range 12E section 21 – I looked for the marker where northern line of section 21 intersects northern line of section 20, by railroad tracks at the western end of Blodgett Ave. Thanks. -
Sorry for the delay…No records on file for that section/Range. That puts you pretty close to the Lake near Crab Tree Farm. You can do some research and look for the original Plat of Crab Tree Farm or old records for Sheridan. Probably some records for it’s original location on file as associated with a subdivision plat or private survey, but hasn’t been reset (or probably had an updated corner document on file). That’s a UP RR line so there could be hope if one wanted to dig into it. I would start with the assumption that Sheridan ran along the Section line. BTW I have family bout 20 miles South of you on Sheridan in Rogers Park.
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@stlsurveyor
You are correct about Crab Tree Farm. I found this map from 1885, which shows Blodgett??s land that is now Crab Tree Farm.
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