Many people think of land surveyors as only being guys in hard hats and bright vests peering through some sort of instrument thingy setting atop some spindly set of legs.?ÿ They have no concept of the history majors we actually are.?ÿ They see us as button pushers who then apply some sort of brilliant upperlevel thinking skills to do the math to arrive at our conclusions very precisely.
First and foremost we are historians solving the ancient riddles that may have started several centuries ago or as recently as the date on some subdivision plat.?ÿ We are in the "WHY" business.?ÿ How did we get from being an unsettled land with no concept of boundaries to the incredibly complex muddled mess we work with every day in our attempt to delineate precisely where a specific parcel of real estate exists?
Why do we think that tract exists??ÿ Why was it separated from some larger tract??ÿ Why was that tract separated from an even larger tract??ÿ Why was that even larger tract created in the first place??ÿ Why does it appear that no one has cared where the boundaries of the tract are for decades??ÿ Why does some municipality or agency or corporation believe they have certain rights that impact that tract??ÿ Why are there multiple rights within what is known as the bundle of rights associated with a specific tract? Why??ÿ Why??ÿ Why?
During my initial conversation with the backhoe operator on the dig for the stone that had been unseen since 1935 he asked several "Why's".?ÿ We had to kill some time until other County workers showed up with ROAD CLOSED signs so we spent a fair amount of time investigating each "Why" that he presented.?ÿ After each answer to a "Why" came a slightly different "Why" that fed off the first answer.?ÿ He was legitimately interested and quite willing to learn.
He had spent all of his roughly 50 years living in the same county yet he knew almost nothing of the history beyond what might get stuck in some local news story or a standard history book.?ÿ Sadly, that describes most people.
He listened intently to everything, which was refreshing.?ÿ We started with a discussion as to why we were searching for a stone.?ÿ The who, what, when, where, why and how of it being found in 1935.?ÿ That led to discussion of the 1898 placement of the stone by the County Surveyor while attempting to set the center of section monument.?ÿ That led to discussion on how the Government survey work to lay out sections proceeded in the 1866-1867 time frame.?ÿ That led to discussion of how only two miles north of where we were standing was the start of an area of his county that had Government survey work in the 1853-55 time frame with slightly different instructions.?ÿ That led to why the earlier work had to stop at a certain line, which was the boundary between lands technically possessed by different tribes and each tribe had relinquished their claim at a different time based on their own needs and circumstances.?ÿ That lead to how the US Government had relocated various tribes from other locations??ÿ He was amazed to learn that his home town was not intended to exist.?ÿ The historians report that within the one tribe individuals could own land rather than the tribe in general ownership.?ÿ When a party arrived about 1842 to establish a new military fort they discovered the land best suited for their needs was owned by a rather influential member of the tribe.?ÿ His asking price was so far above the amount they could offer that they moved on.?ÿ About 50 miles later they discovered another potential site which happened to be a few miles past the boundary of that tribe's lands.?ÿ A fort was built and a city grew up around it, instead of 50 miles further south.?ÿ We also talked about how less than ten miles to the east was the State boundary set in the 1820's and how that location affected the placement of the fort and all later development.?ÿ We also spent a little time on early trails and the ridges that separate river basins and how those influenced settlement patterns.?ÿ And, how those settlement patterns have led to certain boundaries in place today.
For every surveyor who has learned the history of the area they work in and do the research into deed records, corner records, adjacent plats, etc., how many 1320 club button pushers are there?
For every surveyor who has learned the history of the area they work in and do the research into deed records, corner records, adjacent plats, etc., how many 1320 club button pushers are there?
TOO MANY!
I majored in history my first two years of college.?ÿ Well actually I majored in Spades in the student center with my then girlfriend.?ÿ Then I had that "What"? moment when I decided that making a living as a history teacher was not for me.
I still love digging into those dusty old Grantor/Grantee books, deed books and plats.?ÿ It's interesting to trace the current well known (and often wealthy back through their ancestors and their property.?ÿ Unfortunately we can't go back further than the 1880s here because the courthouse burned (again after Sherman burned it the first time).
Andy
More than there probably should be considering all the resources available for Surveyors now. Decades ago we did not have the opportunities to learn about what the courts had been saying all along about what we were doing wrong. Around 1980 a guy in our state started trying to tell us that we needed to unlearn a lot of the misunderstandings and myths we had been mislead about for the previous 30-40 years. It didn’t go over well with a lot of the “old-timers”. Fast-forward to today and we have much better information available, if we just take advantage of it.
This week a young Fire Apparatus Engineer asked me about surveying history because he is charged with teaching new firefighters about the PLSS. I'm impressed that he knows about chains the device (did they really measure with chains?) and chains the distance.
The county where we were digging is bordered on the east by the State line, contains a standard parallel, has the east-west Indian boundary I mentioned plus a north-south Indian boundary that impacts a very small portion of one corner.?ÿ It is also subject to differing special instructions other either side of the east-west Indian boundary.?ÿ It is home to the oldest settlement of size in this corner of the state.?ÿ Fortunately, I have never accepted a job working along that State line, which is senior, of course.?ÿ I don't know that I have ever encountered a location where the section corners matched up along that line as it would be purely accidental if they did.?ÿ There are roads that appear to go straight across but one side or the other is not following a section line.
Thank heavens we, in the Colonial State, don't have to deal with that.?ÿ We trace back as far as we can and reconstruct to the best of ability and records.?ÿ There have been problems with County lines but doesn't usually affect property lines.?ÿ Of course we don't have the "cookbbook" that PLSS States have either (channeling McMilimeter).
Andy
The historians report that within the one tribe individuals could own land rather than the tribe in general ownership.
That is common in Indian Reservations; they're called allotments.?ÿ Since their inception in 1887 the process has been fraught with inequities, questionable provenance and nearly no accurate ground surveys.?ÿ In my (former) neck of the woods concerning the Umatilla, Walla Walla and Yakima have leased farmable land to white farmers at inequitable rates for decades, impoverishing the tribes.
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Read further here:
The history of an area and the surveyors that worked in and around it are important to learn about. In my home county, R.W.C. (Confederate veteran) was county surveyor for many years. I know from experience and word of mouth that he wasn't very particular about the accuracy of his chaining, but his compass was true. I surveyed for an old man that helped him as a youth. He had a lot to say. Then J.H.W. worked in the area. Rarely do his surveys make sense in any regard. T.H.V. came here with a railroad he surveyed for. One of my mentors learned under him. His chaining was pretty accurate for the day but his bearings were a bit lax. I'm lucky enough to have some of R.W.C.'s original field books. There are notes in the margins about things that were going on in his life, etc. That history, or local knowledge, is invaluable in following the old times. You have to treat each retracement a little different when computing search points, etc.
One tribe here in central OK, the Citizen Potawatomi, has a program of buying back any the original allotments that had passed to non-native Americans that they can get their hands on. It's a robust system fueled by their cash-cow casinos. I've worked on 2 acre tracts up to 160 acre tracts.
They also have their own title company and are self insured. I'm all for it...get 'er done.
@bill93 let’s not get to hasty disparaging the 1320 Club. That place has been a landmark since I was in high school
History is my passion as well. I enjoyed reading your thread about the quarter stones. (I have removed asphalt for corners, and once in a nearby town had to drain and remove dirt from a centerline stone but it had a monument box in the road way)
My calculus class in college had a project, to learn about exponential growth. The teacher wanted us to take the population numbers for one town in our county and graph the population growth using r square for showing the variation.
Knowing fully the history of my county I chose the town I live in. Rather unassuming town, that no matter what part of the county you are in, seems to be right on the border with it. In fact, the entire county was once this town. Between the 1600s and 1900 three other towns were created. Then in the incorporation craze of the late 19th and early 20th century, about 20 other towns were created out of this one area.?ÿ
Needless to say, I knew that the formula would not be an exponential growth chart over all, but I got to use a few different methods of presenting the data and got to share the history of my area.
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What I found most interesting about this career is that so many of the forefathers seemed to be surveyors if not in business at least in ability. George Washington started out surveying his tulip garden at Mount Vernon and surveyed for 50 years, right up till his death.
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Scanning of old documents has really helped the historical side of this job. It would be hard getting as much work done in a day if we had to hit the clerks office all the time.?ÿ
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Few of our old documents have been scanned so learning your way around the physical records is essential.?ÿ Foolish consultants who have made bids based on the assumption they would be skimming through indexed scanned documents online are shocked to learn they have "screwed the pooch" and must find a way to finish under budget by some other means.
@andy-bruner Carpetbaggers burned most every courthouse and records around here after the war
