Granite Stone Post
I am always feeling a little trepidation when about to publish a map. Is there a spelling error that someone will notice and think me a fool? Did I forget to add a note, describe a monument incorrectly or forget the north arrow?
Anyway, I will leave the map for a few days and then look at it again and again to try and detect any error that may have gotten past me in review.
Once published, a map will remain in the public record a very long time, forever, unless there is a fire??
This story is about a note I read on a survey map that was so bold that I was shocked.
The monument in the photograph, a granite stone post, is presumably a marker to a highway layout from 1759 and then altered in 1959. It may be that the stone post is from either of those times, but upon finding it, my first thought was about a note another surveyor had left on a map in 1975.
He wrote that the layout had been ????re-established by reference to existing pavement as bounds supposed to have been set on the westerly line were not found and presumably never set.?
First of all, I do not use the pavement as a monument. Our rules of evidence call for the use of long standing fences to be used as evidence of the highway boundary in the absence of other evidence. Secondly, I think he may have more concisely wrote that he did not find bounds to indicate the line.
I didn??t like the note from the first reading. It is presumptuous to assume that bounds were never set. Even if I am wrong about the purpose of the stone post I would never imply that others had not made an effort.
Coincidentally, I was not able to find any of the marks that were presumably set by the surveyor in 1975, so am I to assume that he was derelict in his duties?
The second photograph shows another side of the same stone post with ??1957? painted in red, a color often used by a state government agency to witness marks their surveyors have set or found. The paint shows a date that is two years before the alteration of the highway. Although I have not come to any conclusion yet as the survey is in progress, it makes me think the stone post is a marker of the original layout.
Log in to reply.