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Photos of early 1900s bench marks (test post)
(this is a test post on beer leg. I posted this same info on the new RPLS and was curious at how the two sites handled photo-intensive posts… the ease of creating the posts at either site, editing the posts, sizing photos, quality and legibility of the photos once posted, etc. Lets see what happens…)
Photos of early 1900s bench marks
In the last couple years I’ve stumbled across a couple of examples of early 1900s benchmarks that the members of this board might find interesting.
First, instructions on how to make a bench mark on a tree from the 1898 “A Textbook on Surveying and Mapping” by the International Correspondence School:
The first example I ran across of this style of bench was set in a 1908 bench run from Fort Klamath (130 miles south of Bend, just a little south of Crater Lake) to Prineville (32 miles east of Bend). While searching for traces of the 1853 Elliott Wagon Trail (which later became the 1867 Huntington wagon road), my friend John Frye found this stump:
28” Ponderosa Pine stump:
Close-up of tag and nail :
Close-up of tag – “4450” is stamped next to the word “feet” and on the bottom right-hand corner the number “182” is partially obscured by the tack head.
John wrote to the USGS and they informed him that this bench, BM 182, was set in a 1908 level run from Fort Klamath, Oregon to Prineville, Oregon. They also sent scanned images of the computation book pages for portion of the run in our vicinity.
Cover of 1908 field computation book A7829:
Sketch from 1908 field computation book A7829 (this work also included a level run around Crater Lake)
Page 35 has the information for BM 182, which is more of a temporary bench mark. The next bench after 182 is “F 2” which was (it appears to be gone now) a brass disk. It appears that permanent disks were set every 5 miles and named A 2, B2, #2, et cetera. Some of these are still in existence today and have NGS data sheets . Approximately every mile these TMBs like BM 182 were set in trees and numbered consecutively … 180, 181, 182…
(of interest to Oregon surveyors is the red inked note at the top of the page that reads:
“descriptions corrected by McArthur Aug 21 1926”. This is Lewis A. McArthur, the original author of the book “Oregon Geographic Names” )John and I went hunting for BM 199 which is in the desert east of town. The information for 199 is found on page 38 of the computation book and it was supposedly about a mile west of bench “M 2”, which we knew existed:
The 36” diameter Juniper had been cut down by wood cutters many decades ago, but fortunately they high-stumped the tree, leaving a very unique bench mark for us to find:
The tree was actually a twin juniper, with a scribed blaze and the tag on one trunk and the actual bench at the base of the other trunk:
A triangle was blazed into the tree and the elevation 3276 was scribed into the blaze. The “3” is now overgrown, although a portion of it is still partially visable.
Tag detail – “3276” stamped next to “feet” and “199” stamped in lower right-hand corner
Bench detail on other stump:
The following bench is along a canal and I believe it was set circa 1905 by the irrigation company surveyors. The “BM” scribe is legible, but not the elevation.
Text book “bench mark is… cut in the form af a pyramid
In these parts, this type of bench was being made for the next couple decades. We found this bench set during the construction of the 1927 Cloverdale Market Road. The level notes give a station/offset (no doubt paced), which might be helpful to get an approximate location on the road to begin searching for P.I. monumentation
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