This is what remains of a land grant corner originally marked in Fayette County, Texas in 1844 along the North line of a Mexican land grant located in 1831.
I had arrived at an approximate location for the corner, but wished I had a tractor with a box blade to scrape about a 6' x 12' area down to search for any remains of the rotted stake that the 1844 surveyor set.
Ultimately what lead me to dig in this spot was a feature where the probe could be readily extended about 18 inches further into the ground than at locations surrounding it. I interpreted it as the stumphole of one of the bearing trees the 1844 surveyor had marked.
How many times in a similar situation have I wished for a tractor with a box blade to shave down the soil? As it turned out, my client had a tractor with a box blade already mounted on it and ready to go. So we carefully scraped away at the soil until he hit a hardpan layer that would have required the ripper teeth to get anywhere. I didn't want to do that, but proceeded with hand tools at a spot that fell the 1844 surveyor's bearing and distance from what the tile probe said was the center of a stumphole that other evidence suggested was that of one of the bearing trees marked by the 1844 surveyor.
The limestone cluster was 7 inches further down (a total of about 10 inches down from ground level before the tractor work) and was mixed with shards of hand blown glass that appeared to be broken whiskey bottles and bits of hand-thrown pottery. It may well have been "christened" by breaking them on it. The original wood stake had rotted to dust apparently and only survived as a soft spot in the soil where I set my rod and cap monument, leaving it up enough that it would be on the surface after backfilling the hole.
In the sandy loam of that tract, the limestones were as artificial looking as the bits of broken glass and crockery. There are basically no limestones visible on the surface anywhere on the tract or exposed along water courses.
This was what the stumphole looked like, a shallow depression that once had a post and wire fence running to it that elsewhere had been built from tree to tree. In the background, the lengths of white PVC pipe indicate where the tile probe had found an old fence post hole. Their line ran from the very large Live Oak in the background to the stumphole, which I consider to be further evidence of a tree having been there when the fence was built. It's actually a not uncommon pattern, the wire fence that runs along the line surveyed and then veers off it to a bearing tree with a surveyor's mark on it that must have impressed the fence builders.
About the best you can do in instances such as this is determine the center of the stumphole (in this case with the tile probe) and set a permanent mark at that center. I set one of my rod and cap monuments to perpetuate the location of the bearing tree.
So, how did the 1844 surveyor do? The bearing from the rod and cap set at the soft spot in the ground at the limestone cluster to the rod and cap at the center of the stumphole was:
N3°41'E, 7.645 varas
(Record Call: N5°E, 8 varas)
Other lines run by the 1844 surveyor show that he had his compass adjusted to a "North" direction with a grid bearing of N1°35'W, approximately.
So, basically, the agreement in bearing and distance was quite good, particularly considering that the 1844 surveyor would have measured his tie to the "X" he marked on the now non-existent bearing tree at least 30 inches above ground level and my tie was to the approximate center of the tree at ground level.
Very elegant Kent. Have you retraced this guy's work before on other surveys?
so you are stating that nobody has been at this corner since 1844?
no subsequent record to the setting of the original?
How much time was spent in toto probing for the BT and the corner?
anyway, nice work.
I am glad to see a real Live Oak in TX. 😉
Kent, just curious, but with the amount of variance in a found stump hole and a buried pile of rocks, couldn't you have made the distance 8 varas?
I'm assuming that the difference between your measured distance and the "record" is slightly under a foot using the "Texan" vara?
I mean you only had to adjust each point less than a half foot, of the stump hole a foot?
good stuff, Kent. Those witness tree stump holes last a long long time if the soil hasn't been tampered with.
> Kent, just curious, but with the amount of variance in a found stump hole and a buried pile of rocks, couldn't you have made the distance 8 varas?
Well, the surveyor whose record called for the distance to the bearing tree as being 8 varas rounded all his BT calls to the nearest vara. So, that means that any distance between 7.51 varas and 8.49 varas would fit his call. In that scenario, I see a discrepancy of less than 0.36 varas (1 ft.) as insignificant.
I thought that the evidence at the corner, i.e. (a) cluster of rocks and (b) soft spot in earth consistent with rotted out stake, carried the day.
The obvious problem with using the center of a stumphole as the exact location of the bearing tree is that trees don't usually grow exactly plumb. However, the actual evidence is the stumphole and I think setting the rod and cap in the center of the stumphole without any fiddling is the best practice. No experienced surveyor should expect better agreement than the results show.
Hope a surveyor not paying as much attention to detail as you obviously have doesn't mistake the monument you set for the bearing tree to be the actual corner. Very cool pictures of the original monument
> so you are stating that nobody has been at this corner since 1844?
> no subsequent record to the setting of the original?
No, the land grants to either side of that corner were conveyed using the field notes from the 1844 survey until about the middle 20th century. In subsequent surveyors's work there is confusion about the location of the corner.
> How much time was spent in toto probing for the BT and the corner?
> anyway, nice work.
In this case oil and gas development has reached the area and the need was to have a correct answer rather than a fast one. :> The stumphole was fairly easy to find. It took about two hours to dig up the corner, set a rod and cap, and tie both rods and caps in. What took the time was examining all the evidence that pointed to that location.
>Have you retraced this guy's work before on other surveys?
No, the original surveyor was a fellow named James P. Hudson who was originally from Tennessee, it appears. I would be interested to examine other corners that he and his party established to see whether they made a practice of "christening" them with broken glass and pottery.
And the measurement to bearing trees were made to the face of the tree, no? I understand the use of significant digits to define the accuracy (of course) but I would have been tempted to make it 8 varas, just because I could! 🙂
Good job, Kent
We know why most paleontologists and archeologists work for little or no money. It is too much fun to find that artifact, way down deep.
> Hope a surveyor not paying as much attention to detail as you obviously have doesn't mistake the monument you set for the bearing tree to be the actual corner.
Well, I did stamp the cap "BT", so it would take an unusual individual to think it was anything other than a rod and cap set in a stumphole. More importantly, one of the products of my work will be a modernized metes and bounds description that gives all the details and geodetic positions of this and other old corners that I've been able to locate. Naturally, the description will mention the rod and cap in the stumphole.
> And the measurement to bearing trees were made to the face of the tree, no?
Actually, it varied. Some surveyors measured to the center of the tree at the height of the mark, some to the face at the height of the mark, and some just paced the distance. I'd say that BT ties to the center of the tree at the height of the mark are most common in my experience.
> I understand the use of significant digits to define the accuracy (of course) but I would have been tempted to make it 8 varas, just because I could!
In my opinion, it would look faked in a way that reporting the small discrepancy does not.
Be on the look out, Kent. Looks like Don's itching to pincushion your corner. 😉
> Be on the look out, Kent. Looks like Don's itching to pincushion your corner.
I'd suspect that survey measurements were just more carefully made in Massachusetts than they were on the Texas frontier. That would explain why Don is bothered by a discrepancy that seems completely normal to me.
Impressive (as usual).
> In my opinion, it would look faked in a way that reporting the small discrepancy does not.
Exactly, when I see a measurement reported “right on the nuts’, I develop a mild suspicion of the survey.
Now some see this as a question of ‘expert measurement’ by stating that the original measurement is lacking somewhat in accuracy but the mindset should be is that the current measurement is a kudos to the original measurement of the previous surveyor. So one should not see it as a lack of respect for the former surveyor but an actual acknowledgement of their ‘expert measurement' skills in a previous time.
:good: