1954-vintage County Line Monument

Kent McMillan · 2010-10-30T00:29:10Z

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.

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Strictly Surveying

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Kent McMillan

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> Contrary to popular belief, higher forms of intelligence don't always do a good job.

Well, if so, they came from a star system where orange plastic flagging is so abundant that they use ten times more than we would on Earth. In this case, actually, I wouldn't have flagged a 4.5 ft. tall 6 x 6 concrete monument in plain view. It's probably just me, though.

Posted : October 31, 2010 11:31 am

dave-karoly

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that's just the remains of the harness they used to pull it up to the ship.

Posted : October 31, 2010 11:35 am

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1954-vintage County Line Monument

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