Identifying the Unrecorded Plat (1857)
Not all of the disputes I work on are in rural Texas. One came in last year that was in one of the oldest parts of Houston, in an area known as the W.R. BAKER ADDITION, NORTH SIDE OF BUFFALO BAYOU in the old First Ward. The matter in question was the line between two lots in a block that had been sold in 1862 by the subdivider, one W.R. Baker, a railroad executive and future mayor of Houston, describing the land by block number and by reference to “the Map of the City of Houston made by S.C. West”.
There was a Samuel C. West who was County Surveyor of Harris County around 1857, so at the face of things the conveyance described the conveyance of the block by reference to a map made by him. Unfortunately the plat was apparently never recorded in the Harris County Deed Records and so that and other conveyances made by W.R. Baker made reference to a “Map of the City of Houston made by S.C. West” that is not presently known to appear of record in the County Clerk’s Office or in the records of the Houston City Engineer.
The addition appears on a map made in 1867 by others.
In 1868, a City Surveyor and Engineer made a report to the Houston City Council in which he reported that Mr. Baker had not (as of that date) placed the map of his addition of record. So there is reason to think that it existed mainly in the subdivider’s hands at that point in time. Generally, later conveyances glossed over the fact that the map existed as a phantom drifting somewhere in 19th century history by simply describing the map as “unrecorded”.
Some inquiries turned up no clue as to where S.C. West’s map of the City of Houston might be. However, the records of the Houston City Engineering Department turned out to hold a scanned image of a map entitled “Plat Showing the Baker, Shearne & Riordan Add.” with no date or author that has a mixture of attributes that could date it.
The research consisted of examining those clues appearing on the map as well as what are clearly some later annotations which turn out to most likely date from the 1890s. In the absence of a map of known provenance from the hand of S.C. West, the effort was a bit like examining any other document for the clues it provides as to authorship and time. The attached report describes the process by which the creation of the otherwise unidentified map was narrowed to a particular time period that left it as the only really plausible candidate among various maps known to exist. When you consider that something nearly always beats nothing, that is no small thing.
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