I think that I've mentioned that a substantial percentage of my work is in connection with land disputes. A few years ago, I worked on one in which what was at issue was the location of a land grant made by the State of Texas that had been originally located in 1875. The land grant at issue is what is known as the J.H. Gibson Survey No. 1521 that appears slightly above and right of center in the sketch below, annotated "Jno. H. Gibson" with the file number "S-17261".
In this case, a combination of factors, beginning with confusions and obvious errors in the original surveys, meant that a substantial amount of research work needed to be done first in the records of the Texas GLO in order to even figure out where various surveyors had actually run lines and marked corners from which the 1875 location was made - apparently entirely in the office, as it turned out. In case anyone is interested in seeing exactly why resurveying within the patchwork quilt of Texas land grants is as interesting as it is, I've attached a copy of the Surveyor's Report I wrote summarizing the results of that research and giving the conclusions that can be drawn from the GLO records alone.
This is a case where a working sketch drawn strictly from the field notes on file in the GLO would be relatively useless without the accompanying narrative of the facts set out in the report.
One of the typical elements of the early surveys is the gross conflict that was discovered in a series of surveys that Charles DeMontel located on what he called "Clear Creek" in late 1853. As it turned out, that was the same creek that John C. Hays had called "Lagoona" or "Laguna" creek in 1840 and along which Hays had located the series of surveys shown in the sketch below:
I can only imagine the look on DeMontel's face when he learned after the fact that he had spent days making an entire series of surveys that were entirely upon land previously appropriated and hence invalid. Here is the sketch of DeMontel's work.
The approximate exent of the conflict was determined by overlaying the two sketches in the office, aligning the creek as the one common feature since neither series of surveys tied to any common survey corner.
And so it was in the drafting room at the GLO that the conflict was disclosed by this sketch that overlaid DeMontel's later surveys on those made by Hays in 1840. Note the alternate locations miles apart shown on the sketch. That is, the draftsman saw two different pieces of Clear/Laguna Creek that seemed to fit the calls in the different sets of field notes well.
One of the more interesting details of how Charles de Montel's work was corrected to eliminate the conflict with the senior locations made by John C. Hays in 1840 (before Mr. Hays left for California) was that de Montel signed the corrected field notes for Survey 1089 in 1873 (as described on Page 12 of the report) that someone else had apparently drawn up, spelling the names of the chain carriers differently twenty years later.
In 1853, they were John Lamon and Ch. Nagelin. In 1873, those same names were written as "J. Lehman" and "Charles Naegely". During the Civil War, Charles de Montel was the Captain of a company of Texas Rangers in Blanco, Bandera, Medina, and Uvalde Counties with enlistment records showing a Private John Lamon serving under his command. So "Lamon" was most likely the correct spelling which some other surveyor who actually drew up the corrected field notes rendered as "Lehman" when the names of the chain carriers were told to him.
In reconstructing old surveys, probably one of the most important elements of the work is to consider what a particular surveyor understood to be the arrangement of prior surveys in the area in which he intended to make new surveys to cover bits of what he supposed to be unappropriated public domain.
The early, superceded GLO county maps provide a great deal of information in that regard since they should represent the arrangement of the prior surveys in the county in the same manner in which they maps of the County Surveyor would have shown them. The map below is a detail of the 1862 GLO county map for Atascosa County.
Note that it shows the conflict in the Hays and de Montel surveys along Clear/Lagunas Creek as the extent and location of that same conflict was thought to exist at the time the map was compiled.
Note also that the early county maps typically show some details that do not appear on the current maps for various reasons. For example, this 1862 map shows the location of the Antonio Trevinio Survey No. 1249 according to its field notes filed by F.K. Polshinsky in 1855, but which was held in 1858 to be ineligible for patent pending some proof that the land certificate under which the survey had been made had not previously been located by others elsewhere. The 1862 map is useful because the field notes for the Henry Wilkey Survey No. 1249-1/2 that William Caruthers made in 1858 tie to a corner of the Trevinio Survey before it became a phantom and disappeared from the county map and explain in part Caruthers's work.
The same William Caruthers who in 1858 had located the Henry Wilkey Survey No. 1249-1/2 (outlined in red below) returned to the vicinity of the Wilkey Survey in 1874 to make the J. Poitevent Surveys 1 through 16 (outlined in aqua below). On of the more interesting questions regarding Mr. Caruthers's work is how exactly he decided to locate the surveys surrounding the Wilkey Survey in order to avoid conflicts.
The record of his work indicates that he built his locations of the block of Poitevent surveys off of the series of surveys made to the West by John C. Hays on Lagunas Creek 34 years earlier, but without apparently recovering any corner that Mr. Hays had made in the course of his earlier work. So, why did Mr. Caruthers leave relatively large gaps between the lines of the Wilkey Survey and his new work in 1874? One possible explanation is that (a) he had scaled a position for the block of Poitevent surveys off of the county map and (b) was not at all adept at calculating anything other than rectangles.
BTW it's the surrounding historical circumstances and the surveyors that make Texas surveying interesting. Here is a link to a bio for Charles de Montel (aka Charles Scheidemonte) who was evidently Prussian before he was Texan, and who should have known perfectly well how to spell "Lehman".
http://www.findagrave.com/cgi-bin/fg.cgi?page=gr&GRid=81170789
As for Atascosa County Surveyor William Caruthers who in 1874 surveyed those sixteen sections outlined in aqua in the sketch above: he was born in Christian County, Kentucky 24 Sept 1809 and came to Texas with his brother John in 1830. William Caruthers settled in Fayette County and fought in the Texas Revolution.
He was married to Sarah Dicey Kay 6 July 1845 in Fayette County. The couple moved to Atascosa County where he was both postmaster and County Surveyor and his wife was a doctor with a wide practice.
Mr. Caruthers was an ardent opponent of slavery and had to live in Mexico for a time during the Civil War to escape pro-Confederate vigilantes. He died at age 77 in 1886, so would have running lines through the mesquite of Atascosa County at age 65 in 1874 when the block of the J. Poitevent block was located.
Good stuff! Thanks for sharing. Jp
Jp7191, post: 388530, member: 1617 wrote: Good stuff! Thanks for sharing.
You're welcome. I'm offering up some of the bits and pieces a few at a time. The work that Mr. Caruthers did in 1874 has some really interesting features that give an idea of some of the unusual aspects of Texas surveying in the 1870s when vast piles of land scrip were being located. Beginning with some idea of who Mr. Caruthers was is, I think, part of figuring out what he did and did not do.
Fascinating history.