GLO lot acerage

It depends on wether it's within limits or not. If it is then you can just add through..

South Side? 80?

linebender, post: 452591, member: 449 wrote: South Side? 80?

South side 80 chains on 1856 plat, 80.92 on a resurvey in 1916 of Section 11.

I was just a little rusty on the procedure. The lot acreages are on the 1856 plat and doing the math is how I come up with the sides of the lots. It's one of those math deals that kinda makes one think. Usually area is calculated multiply and then divide to get area. On GLO lots where the one direction is 20 chains you can simply add the other two sides in chains to get the area in acres. It just always seemed a bit strange to me but it works. What I really needed was the sides to proportion in the location of the 1/16 line on south side of lot. Hadn't done this for awhile, needed to convince the rusty old brain how it works. Adding sides to get area instead of the standard multiply, divide, just one of those things that "works" on GLO lots.

The lot areas on the plat from left to right are: 40.44, 40.50, 40.55, 40.61.
From that you can back out what the draftsman used for the side lines, which way he averaged a half a 0.01 of a chain.

Try this one on for size. Adding the sides doesn't seem to work when the south line isn't 80 ch
They subtract 0.23 acres off the sum of the two sides for each lot.
i.e west lot is 26.56 + 26.75 = 53.31 - 0.23 = 53.08
east lot 27.32+27.13= 54.45 - 0.23 = 54.22
I trust they had a simple way in 1838. Can you explain the 0.23 deduction?

linebender, post: 452647, member: 449 wrote: Try this one on for size. Adding the sides doesn't seem to work when the south line isn't 80 ch
They subtract 0.23 acres off the sum of the two sides for each lot.
i.e west lot is 26.56 + 26.75 = 53.31 - 0.23 = 53.08
east lot 27.32+27.13= 54.45 - 0.23 = 54.22
I trust they had a simple way in 1838. Can you explain the 0.23 deduction?

Looks like they calculate that the missing wedge is 0.92 acres and divide it by 4, then subtract from each lot. Never had this GLO draftsman trick explained to me. Not sure I ever seen this before, but that doesn't mean much.

There are two simple methods that work on "most" GLO lotted sections.
1. Lot acres - one side = the other side. In linebender's example above it works perfectly.
2. Lot acres + lot acres / 4 = side between. In linebender's example above this method doesn't match method 1 worth a darn, which is why I say "most".
In my experience these 2 methods jive with each other within 1 or 2 links about 90% of the time.