Strohs is a beer from back when....kind of like Schlitz
Holy Cow, post: 446112, member: 50 wrote: As pointed out above, nearly all of the stones placed around here were for the original Government PLSS survey or a perpetuation thereof set by a county engineer/surveyor in the 19th Century. I'm not sure I've ever looked for stones set for some incredibly little parcel such as the one in Pennsylvania that started this thread. Many of the early private surveys like that will show wood stakes at the corners. I have carried out diligent searches for them where there was any hope whatsoever of their continued existence but have never found one yet. The only wood stake I have ever encountered was set next to a stone at a section corner when a small town was platted from that corner about 1870. We dug in the county road with a backhoe to discover both the stone and the wood stake. The wood stake turned out to be a six-inch diameter circular section of a hedge trim limb. Hedge meaning Osage Orange/Bois d'arc/Bodark. It is very dense and durable. BTW, we drove a one-inch bar between the stone and stake and put the top about two inches lower than the top of the stone, which was the true section corner monument. Follow the signal and you will find the stone at a depth of about 30 inches below the surface. Some would say I was foolish not to set what is our minimum monument ( 1/2" by 24" iron bar ) directly over the center of stone to simplify the work of future surveyors. I will let my corner records, filed with both the State and County, do that job.
I remember needing to find a corner under an intersection asphalt road. there were ties to the corner, which I found and could pretty well pinpoint where they tied corner was. The trouble was that there was a huge patch of new asphalt covering a big area including where the corner would fall. I decided I had to do an exercise in futility and try to dig a big enough hole to ascertain that the corner was not there. While I started cutting up the asphalt a guy in a pickup truck pulled up to the stop sign and asked me what I was looking for. I told him and he replied "I can guarantee it's not there. I won't tell you how I know but I guarantee you won't find it".
He was right, I didn't find the corner.