Following the 1891 Surveyor Today

Today's field work involved retracing various lines of a 1000 acre tract originally surveyed in 1891 that adjoins a larger tract I'm surveying. I mention it because it provides an example of the persistence of certain trace evidence.

The calls of the portion of the boundary of interest as set forth in the original deed of conveyance were as follows, running from a corner on an original land grant line:

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N45°E, 3946 varas to rock mound from which:
- a Live Oak 4" mkd X bears S55-1/2°W, 11 varas,
- another 10" mkd X bears N87-1/4°W, 20-4/5 varas;

Thence S45°E, 239 varas to rock mound from which a Live Oak 8" mkd X bears S83-1/2°E, 11-1/5 varas;

Thence N88-3/4°E, at 195 varas corner of rock fence ....
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(For the non-Texans, our statutory vara is 33-1/3 inches, 36 varas = 100 ft.)

On the ground, there is a wire fence that I would guess is probably 1950's or 60's vintage, with some scattered traces of an older fence along it, i.e. scraps of much older wire ingrown into trees and a few posts that appear to be much older than those in the fence. The courses of the fence resemble the 1891 surveyor's description as far as the relative angles between the three courses go and the distances were close, between the fence posts, i.e.:

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Record Actual

239 vrs. 239.390 vrs.

195 vrs. 196.480 vrs.
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On other work that the 1891 surveyor had done in the area in 1889, the chaining was running long by a scale factor of about 1.0048. That is, a line he had reported to be 2283 varas in length was found by resurvey to actually be 2294.04 varas long, which is quite similar to the average excess in the two lines mentioned above, i.e.:

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(239.390 + 196.480)/(239 + 195) = 1.0043
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I was reasonably sure that I had identified the corner of rock fence to which the 1891 surveyor gave a passing call. I set a rod and cap marker on the line of what appears to me to be the base course of an old rock fence where it intersected the line of the older wire fence. The rod and cap falls on the West side of one of the older cedar posts in the fence.

Backing in from that point, 196.480 vrs. and 239.390 varas along the wire fence took me to another corner of the fence

This at first impression appeared to be in the vicinity of the corner described by the 1891 surveyor as:

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Rock Mound from which:
- a Live Oak 4" mkd X bears S55-1/2°W, 11 varas,
- another 10" mkd X bears N87-1/4°W, 20-4/5 varas;
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However, a quick look turned up only a suggestive scatter of rocks, no identifiable mound and no candidates for the two bearing trees. In that area, I'd expect Live Oaks to have grown about 9 inches in diameter since 1891. The 4 in. Live Oak could have been killed by the marking. It was a poor choice for a bearing tree and I did not think that any trace of it could be found. However, the 10 in. Live Oak should have at least left a stump hole.

In the vicinity of the corner, the soil condition was a gravel bound up with a natural cement that made a very hard soil into which a probe rod could not be readily advanced. So it only required a rough tape and compass measurement to get close enough to the position of the bearing tree to find the stump hole with a probe at the approximate center of a low mound. Surrounding the hole, the probe rod refused to go much more than about 3 or 4 inches into the soil. At the stump hole, I could run it down about 16 inches without extraordinary effort in about a 12 in. radius region.

I set a rod and cap at the center of that stump hole and found that the bearing and distance from it checked the cedar fence corner post within less than 1 ft. Given the somewhat lower accuracy of treating the center of the hole as the center of the former bearing tree at the height of the mark to which the distance and bearing would have been taken by the 1891 surveyor, I don't consider that discrepancy to be significant.