Yesterday I was putting records together for a job and the addition name of "Double Tree" seemed vaguely familiar.?ÿ After almost 50 years of surveying that happens to me a lot.?ÿ I hardly give it a second thought.?ÿ But I scoured my job files and found I haven't been in there.?ÿ This is a very rural area so I figured I must've been thinking of someplace else.?ÿ
I made it out there and turned into the addition.?ÿ About 100 yards ahead and standing dead center of the gravel road was a twin-trunk pecan tree.?ÿ All in all the base was about 60" in diameter.?ÿ The road goes around the tree on both sides.?ÿ I was just starting to think the addition was aptly named when I realized I had named this place in the early '80s while working with my father!?ÿ?ÿI remember the developer was delighted that big tree fell in the center of the road and wanted it to remain.?ÿ I had labeled the field book "double tree" and the developer liked it.
I pulled over and rummaged through my job file to find the letter size copy of the plat I had printed off the day before.?ÿ Sure enough, down at the bottom was my father's seal and signature.?ÿ The funny thing was is that it was ME that had hand drafted it.?ÿ I couldn't believe I had looked it over earlier and not even recognized my own drafting.?ÿ I had to chuckle to myself.
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Now I could end this story right now and I wouldn't have to tattle on myself.?ÿ But I'm hopelessly honest to a fault.?ÿ Here's the rest of the story...
I was out there to locate the co-op engineer's stakes to extend and upgrade an overhead primary.?ÿ This type of job is so routine I hardly do anything else but kick up the section corners, dig up a few pertinent property pins and then shoot all of them along with the proposed staking.?ÿ All my line work and ciphering is done when I get back here to my office.
I'm sitting here staring at the screen and just realized I had made a 33' error on the plat in 1983.?ÿ And the sad thing is that error is also made it into the ground.?ÿ Someone's lot is 33' short on one end of the block and the lot at the other end is 33' long.?ÿ Most of the original pins are still there.?ÿ Everybody's fence is tidy and straight.?ÿ The mockingbirds were singing and bucolic peace abounds.
No sense in disturbing things now...all I have to do is figure out how show this mess and write easement descriptions....
No rest for the wicked.?ÿ 😉
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I was certain you were going to tell us your new line would require massive trimming of YOUR tree.?ÿ Glad I was wrong.
If a PLS that??s been in business for more than 10 years tells you they have never made a big boo boo on a survey they??re lying. I once set a center of section 11?? away from an found 6? x 6? concrete monument. Fortunately the only thing I suffered was humiliation among my peers and had to correct it with a replat. ?????ÿ
@flga-2-2
So true.?ÿ Once I calculated a center of section after having scoured the area for hours.?ÿ I was standing about 10' away at the ready with a pin and a hammer as my helper was centering in on the final location.?ÿ When he gave me the word I stepped forward and tripped over a 1" bar that was sticking out of the ground a tenth or two.
I might not have felt so bad but the pin had old tattered flagging on it...I guess sometimes we just miss stuff. 😉
Yesterday I was putting records together for a job and the addition name of "Double Tree" seemed vaguely familiar
Worked on a subdivision named Doubletree Estates around 2000 where the original surveyor in the 80's had taken some artistic license in the title block.?ÿ?ÿ
I've got your doubletree right here.
Learn new words around here almost every day.?ÿ I am familiar with doubletree and singletree but had never heard of swingletree and whippletree.
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a crossbar in front of a wagon with a swingletree at each end, enabling two horses to be harnessed.?ÿ
Always good to have a chicken coop within reach so you can bite into a fresh one on long roadtrips.
I have heard about double yoked oxen in a really good book I??m reading called Desperate Passage?. It??s about Western migration to California and/or Oregon in the 1800??s with emphasis on the Donner tragedy. Surveyors would like it. ?????ÿ
double yoked oxen
It may be an interesting book, but a double yoke (yoke to fit the necks of two oxen) is nothing like the doubletree used to harness animals to a wagon. See picture earlier in thread.
Thanks. I??m in the portion of the book where they are about to eat each other so I wasn??t paying too much attention about how Oxen pull wagons. ?????ÿ
@flga-2-2
Surely oxen pull wagons the same way they pull plows.?ÿ That would be in a boustrophedonic manner.
"Boustrophedonic?ÿis a favourite of word-lovers, not only because it??s so unusual, but also because it refers to one method of writing ancient scripts, particularly early Greek. These could be written every which way ?? up and down, right to left, left to right ?? but also with alternate lines having reversed word order, so you read from left to right on one line and right to left on the next.
Though it??s usually associated with ancient Greek, boustrophedonic writing has appeared in many places, including the rongo-rongo script of Easter Island, in the Hittite and Etruscan languages, in a few early Latin inscriptions and in runic carvings. The method also appears in some modern applications: microfiche pages are organised this way to minimise the amount of movement needed to follow a sequence of pages; computer printer heads often run boustrophedonically, as do some specialised image scanners. This is another case:
The township plats were to be subdivided into squares of 640 acres numbered from one to 36 starting at the southeast corner and proceeding as the plow follows the ox, in boustrophedonic fashion (ie, left to right, then right to left)."
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BTW, our townships have Section 1 in the northeast corner.?ÿ Have no idea where this author resides.
I've forgotten why it is the official order of surveying sections (if anybody really did it that way) and the numbering scheme bear no resemblance to each other.
