Quarter Corner
To set the stage:
In 1869, A. B. Beauvais subdivides Township 1 North, Range 14 East, Mount Diablo Meridian, and sets the 1/4 between Section 27 and Section 26 with no bearing trees and no significant topo calls on the line.
In 1871 he returns to the area and, being also a Deputy Mineral Surveyor, surveys the Golden Rule Quartz Mine. He sets the NE corner of the mine and calls to a 12″ Live Oak as a bearing tree to the corner and ties to the 1/4 corner which he had set two years previously some 200 feet away.
In 1887, J. P. Dart, another Deputy Mineral Surveyor, who has been in the area since 1849 arrives to survey the Erin Go Braugh Quartz Mine which adjoins the Golden Rule. He says, in a written statement to the Surveyor General, that the 1/4 is gone and in fact, by his own knowledge, it was gone in 1871 when Beauvais claimed to have tied to it because it had been set in a cultivated orchard and was almost immediately destroyed. In addition, Dart says Beauvais’ tie was wrong or the 1/4 corner was set incorrectly because when he goes on to reset it by single proportion and makes a new tie to the NE corner of the Golden Rule, the difference between the ties puts Dart’s 1/4 about 30 feet south of Beauvais.
It is likely, I think, that even if the 1/4 was gone when Beauvais came back to survey the Golden Rule, he knew where it had been only two years before; perhaps in relation to one of the orchard trees (although why didn’t he use them for bearing trees? There is no evidence of an orchard today, the area is dryland pasture.) Maybe he recalled its relationship to some mine feature. The mine was there at the time of the PLLS survey but hadn’t been surveyed itself yet. In any case, he knew where it was or had been.
Today there is no trace of any 1/4 corner, but there is a drill steel that has long been accepted as the NE corner of the Golden Rule and a 29″ Live Oak which may or may not be the bearing tree. It hasn’t been cored and doesn’t fit the drill steel by about 5-6 feet (it’s about 80 feet away.)
Would you accept the drill steel and replace the 1/4 corner at Beauvais’ disputed (but original?) position based on his tie to the mine, calculate a tie from the tree to the mine corner using its original measurement and thence to the 1/4 corner (a sort of second degree tie), or proportion the corner, or…..
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