A tract of land that I'm surveying straddles the county line and so part of the work is to locate the tract boundaries in relation to the county line. This particular line of Travis County was resurveyed in 1954 by then Travis County Surveyor Marlton O. Metcalfe with the occasional assistance of a character named T.A. Breeze who was then the County Surveyor of Hays County. Although Mr. Breeze worked for M.O. Metcalfe and his father shortly after WWII, I don't really think very much of that exposure shaped his practices. I think, in fact, it would be hard to find a more unlikely pair. Metcalfe was very careful and turned out quite solid, well-monumented work. Breeze, not so much.
Here is one of the county line monuments that I'll be tying to.
It took about 40 minutes today just to get the monument looking as good as it does in these photos. When I drove up, it had half a roll of orange flagging wrapped around it and was leaning about 30° off plumb, which can only have meant that some survey party had tied the monument in the position way out of plumb. Stuff happens.
But some quality time with a shovel, work with a pry bar, tamping backfill fill, and deflagging it made it into a monument again. Actually, it was up against the wire fence behind it after plumbing and so I also had to do a little work on the fence, bending some t-posts plumb and adding some slack to a couple of wires to keep the fence from pushing the newly plumbed monument back over.
The "X" on top of the monument was probably fifties-vintage, too. I just freshened it up with a scribe.
BTW, wooden letters were attached to the forms to cast these monuments. I know because one of the monuments on the same line about 16 miles away still has the wooden letter forms in place.
Kent,
Approximately, how much of the monument is below the surface of the ground?
If there's any length to that monument at all, you spent the lion's share of time rehabing it.
Good work.
> Approximately, how much of the monument is below the surface of the ground?
Well, the 6" x 6" monument is about 4.5 ft. above grade and I'd estimate that there probably is about 2.5 ft. to 3 ft. of it below grade. You're right, it was work, but the results are so much better than trying to work up some half-ass estimate of where the top center would be if the monument were replumbed.
I guess it was Leaning Friday. Earlier, I had to work on a row of 1890-vintage fence posts that were leaning even more out of plumb, and in slightly different directions. All I wanted there, though, was just to set a lath about where the post would be if plumbed up so that I could search for any remains of corner post of the same vintage. The black clay soil had dried there and was like adobe brick.
Leaning Friday, indeed. I did two simple lot/block jobs today, both coming in behind the landscapers. One lot had 6 pins, the other had 5. Every single pin had to be rehabbed on both jobs. To make it a perfect day, had to do battle with a chocolate Lab who understood quite well the concept of open and notorious possession. If it was in his fence, it was his possession, including my metal detector, which I had to get the owner to retrieve from the doghouse.
> To make it a perfect day, had to do battle with a chocolate Lab who understood quite well the concept of open and notorious possession.
Well, I parked my truck at a corner of a hay field and hiked a few hundred feet through the ragweed to the vicinity of the corner I was after. I saw a few horses off at the other side of the pasture.
So the first item of work was to lath out the approximate line of this very old cedar post and wire fence.
The nearest old post in the photo above is about 18 ft. distant from where the PVC pipe lath is set along the newer t-post and wire fence. That older cedar post had some square, cut nails in it - which would be about right for a fence built before about 1895 - but it and all the rest of the other old posts of similar vintage were leaning like hell. The top three or four inches of the black clay soil had dried to the hardness of brick, so it was a matter of estimating how much of the post was in the ground, measuring the out-of-plumbness, and estimating where the post would be it it were plumbed up.
I did that in order to get a good approximation of the old fence line so that I could find some remains of the corner post and, in fact, using the probe I was able to locate the post hole where it had been.
That was all fine, but when I went back to the truck to get a rod and cap, the equines were all gathered around it and a couple had been cribbing on some of the vinyl trim. At that moment, I might have traded you for the labrador.
Those concrete posts make really good monuments. We have a lot of those in the forest. They are 4"x4" with a brass cap and usually stick up from 1.5' to 2.5'. Some of those are in really remote locations and they are precast. I found one that was set in 1937 by a Lumber Company Surveyor and it has a scribed X on top just like yours. I found one of ours laying on the ground. It was set next to a 3' tree (now a stump). I found the hole and reset it back down in the hole and filed a corner record. The hole I found fit a bearing tree tag. They obviously move a little over time in some cases but not more than the accuracy of the transit and chain surveys that set them.
> Those concrete posts make really good monuments. We have a lot of those in the forest. They are 4"x4" with a brass cap and usually stick up from 1.5' to 2.5'.
Yes, I like the monument, but the sticking up above grade bit definitely would tend to limit where they could be expected to remain undisturbed.
Kent- are those the standard monument along the line? I guess I'm asking if the counties had undertaken a remonumentation project and replaced all monuments on the county line- or were these just placed at points where the county line crossed the high system?
So, that's a 1954 resurvey of the County line. Is that pretty much indisputable? The "X" on the top that you freshened up with your scribe, how long do you expect that will stay in its exact position? When I leave a monument all flagged-up and pretty and new, I expect that it will be there forever but alas, time takes its toll on the prettiest of monuments. Is it possible that the previous surveyors estimated where the post would have plumbed up and called it good? Straightening it and re-scribing it doesn't necessarily make it more accurate, does it?
> Kent- are those the standard monument along the line? I guess I'm asking if the counties had undertaken a remonumentation project and replaced all monuments on the county line- or were these just placed at points where the county line crossed the high system?
That 1954 survey was a complete resurvey of all of the boundary between Travis and Hays which both counties then agreed to as rerun. The mile posts were also 6 x 6 precast posts, but stubbier. They have a "T" and an "H" instead of the full county names. The taller monuments were only set (as far as I'm aware" where the line intersects public roads.
> So, that's a 1954 resurvey of the County line. Is that pretty much indisputable?
Yes, the line was definitely resurveyed and fixed by agreement as surveyed in 1954.
> The "X" on the top that you freshened up with your scribe, how long do you expect that will stay in its exact position?
In that plastic clay soil, it wouldn't surprise me if five years from now the monument will need to be replumbed.
> When I leave a monument all flagged-up and pretty and new, I expect that it will be there forever but alas, time takes its toll on the prettiest of monuments.
Well, clearly you are an optimist, but most of the county line monuments I've looked for placed by the 1954 survey have survived well. Some road widenings, of course, have taken out the monuments at the road crossings.
> Is it possible that the previous surveyors estimated where the post would have plumbed up and called it good? Straightening it and re-scribing it doesn't necessarily make it more accurate, does it?
Uh, yes, it does. It is in fact the best way that I know to get a very good estimate of where a leaning monument was set. When you consider that the top of that monument was leaning more than two feet out of plumb, you'll realize that you really need a psychic to estimate where the center of the monument with some unknown length in the ground would be without actually standing it up.
How do you estimate the proper pivot point depth? If you don't dig much vs digging almost to the bottom of the post, won't you get a different result when pushed back to plumb?
I wonder.....
Will you file some record of your work on rehab of the monument? Are you required to file in your state? Even if you are perfect in your efforts, the replumbed position will be different than where it was before your effort to preserve the monument.
> How do you estimate the proper pivot point depth? If you don't dig much vs digging almost to the bottom of the post, won't you get a different result when pushed back to plumb?
Bill, I consider that uncertainty to be acceptable. In that highly plastic clay soil, my estimate of the mechanism that shifted the mark off plumb is that a fence behind it exerted a small lateral stress on the upper part of the monument and then gravity took over from wet-and-dry cycle to wet-and-dry cycle.
What I did was to dig out the upper roughly two feet of the soil and then plumb the monument by applying force with a pry bar. In wet weather, usually I would expect any highly saturated layer of the soil (that becomes highly plastic when saturated) to be about 2 ft. deep or less.
For the purposes that the county line will be put to, i.e. calculating the land areas of the tract in each jurisdiction, I think just plumbing the marker is a good enough answer as a practical matter. If we were trying to figure out where the county line ran through the casino, we'd approach the problem somewhat differently, of course.
I wonder.....
> Will you file some record of your work on rehab of the monument? Are you required to file in your state?
The record of the monument will be in the new metes and bounds description of the tract.
> Even if you are perfect in your efforts, the replumbed position will be different than where it was before your effort to preserve the monument.
In my judgment, that would be a proposition that probably can't be proven to be the case. I have several county line monuments that I've tied in, all with NAD83(CORS96) Epoch 2002.0 coordinates. So I can check the plumbed monument for any obvious discrepancy. Barring such, I tend to doubt that it can be proven not to be in the same position in which it was originally established in 1954.
Okay, thanks. It makes sense that you would tie the monument,after rehab to see how it fits and that you would leave some type of record.
I'm gonna' guess that monument also doubles as a scratching post for the livestock on that property. I don't think it's the fence moving it all that much.
> I'm gonna' guess that monument also doubles as a scratching post for the livestock on that property. I don't think it's the fence moving it all that much.
No, the county road is fenced on both sides and doesn't have livestock running in it. In my opinion, it was definitely the wire fence that kicked off the leaning. In that area, just about everything leans, fence posts, power poles, road signs, you name it. It's just the Law of Gravity in action on structures supported by soils that become highly plastic when sufficiently wet.
"No, the county road is fenced on both sides and doesn't have livestock running in it"
That just shot my theory all to hell.
I think an alien spaceship came and beamed the monument up, studied it and when they put it back it was leaning like that. Contrary to popular belief, higher forms of intelligence don't always do a good job.