It never fails to amaze me how many surveyors will proclaim a monument 'wrong' when it doesn't fit their math perfectly and will then set their own monument in the 'correct' location and completely disregard the decades of acceptance by the property owners that have relied on the old monument.?ÿ
About a decade ago I had a heated argument with another surveyor over a monument that I'd set marking a parcel corner and ROW where two old subdivisions met. He had come in from the adjacent subdivision and was subdividing a parcel in his old subdivision while I was working off of control is my old subdivision. He wouldn't budge that my survey was somehow at fault for their being a kink in the ROW at the location where the two met. When I asked him how many corners he'd recovered in the subdivision I was working in, the answer was zero. He wanted to set one of his corners less than a foot away from mine, but the property owner had dug up around the corner I'd set and placed a 24' CMP over it and filled it with concrete. Pincushion that.
A tablet set in the concrete would be a efficient pincushion.
For some reason surveyors generally have a mysterious love affair with mathematically "straight" lines. The abhorrence of "kinks" founded on any general?ÿ legal principle, nor do they create any practical difficulties for land owners. Pincushions on the other hand do.?ÿ
If a monument has been in place for decades then it should not lightly be rejected because the corner must become finally settled and not continually readjusted. Even where a long established monument is founded in an error but if it would create more distress and confusion by disregarding it than it would to place it in the correct location then it should be left in repose.
There is a Maryland case where the court wrote that it's inconsequential if the pipe in question was originally set with the intent to mark the corner based on the math in the deed because, over time, it had acquired a "reputation" in the neighborhood as marking the corner.?ÿ