Henry Sipe WV LS #1

Wonderful post! We have the book, but no treasures like these.

> Wonderful post!

Indeed.

Nice plat...he drew text in slant and straight. Plats that use all straight text are boring and plats that are all slant make me cringe. Just a personal opinion.

> Nice plat...he drew text in slant and straight. Plats that use all straight text are boring and plats that are all slant make me cringe. Just a personal opinion.

I've had this in my possession for about 20 years or more and have looked at it a bunch of times and just noticed tonight a comment at the bottom that says "drawn by James Dixon, Lic Surveyor & draftsman.... Belpre, Ohio". I find this very odd.

Belpre is at least 3 hours or so from Elkins (Randolph Co., WV) and Upshur County (Buckhannon is the county seat) so in the days before electronic data sharing and drafting, I'm not sure how or why this happened. We'll probably never know.

Thanks for posting the links.

By the mid 1970's Henry (who always charged too little) had moved his hourly rate to 1/20th of the national cost of living index as periodically published in the Wall Street Journal. I remember him explaining this to me as a means of surveyors organizations avoiding price fixing lawsuits. According to that I think he was charging about $5.40 per hour by 1974. I think he basically surveyed for fun. Some are that way.

Thank you so much, Carl.
This was/is land surveying to me (a self-acknowledged dinosaur).
But damn, he didn't mention his laser scanner.
🙂
Don

> Thanks for posting the links.

No problem, glad to share.

> By the mid 1970's Henry (who always charged too little) had moved his hourly rate to 1/20th of the national cost of living index as periodically published in the Wall Street Journal. I remember him explaining this to me as a means of surveyors organizations avoiding price fixing lawsuits. According to that I think he was charging about $5.40 per hour by 1974. I think he basically surveyed for fun. Some are that way.

Wasn't Henry already retired from the Forest Service when he started the push for licensure in WV? I'm pretty sure he was. I'm thinking he had to have been been born in about 1910 or before (purely a guess).

What part of Ohio do you practice in Carl? My dad (C. S. Correll, OH PS 6070) worked for Hope Gas in Marietta and did some surveying in SE OH in the early to late 1970's. I'm not sure how many plats he did, or exactly what counties he worked in (mostly Washington) but I'm sure it's over 100.

When Henry was on the board, they reprimanded a surveyor
for doing a Cadillac survey. In a ACSM jourmal, Henry called surveyors on the
carpet for charging poor coal miners too much money. Are
union workers that poor?

My recollection about Henry was that he was retired from Georgia Pacific or one of the major lumber outfits. I could be wrong about some of my memories from 35+ years ago. I have the distinct recollection that Henry, like Walt Robillard, was a forester. It was Walt who introduced me to Henry that long ago.

As for where I have worked in Ohio, it would be from on the lake to on the river, and from the Indiana line to the Pennsylvania line. I worked on the resurvey of the Ohio-Pennsylvania line. I remember having my work on Lake Erie interrupted when the storm that sank the Edmund Fitzgerald came through. I'll never forget that storm. I was licensed in 1979 and my Ohio number is 6638.

For several years I taught the PLSO refresher course segment "Original Ohio Surveys".

Today I am semi retired but all of those distant surveys call out. Next stop will be Seneca County.

10-4 all that. Thanks for the insight.

🙂

> Are union workers that poor?

Not to politicize the thread, but certainly you can't be serious. First off, not all mine workers are unionized, and in some cases, the salaries are better at non-union operations. The economic situation in the coal mining areas of Appalachia have been well documented for decades.

True, a mine worker today can make as much as $55K a year, union or non. But speaking for myself, you couldn't pay me enough money to work in a coal mine.

According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, mining is the second most dangerous occupation in America. In the US alone, more than 100,000 coal miners were killed in accidents over the past century, and chronic lung diseases, (like black lung) are still common in miners, in the US, 4,000 new cases of black lung every year in the US (4 percent of workers annually), and 1,500 die from the disease. (For comparison, there are reportedly 10,000 new cases every year in China.)

I noticed that the drawing date (1971) and work dates (1968) do not agree by several years.

"Back in the day" it was not uncommon for a good draftsman to keep busy doing ink work for several companies at the same time. The surveyor would save up their worksheets and have draftsman come by to overlay and ink them all in one day.

Beginning late 1971 and for about 1 1/2yrs in college my job was at nights for a surveyor/engineer drawing and lettering his plats from worksheets. On Saturday I would do field work.
Some were overlay and others were drawn from scratch. Leroy was used on many and were hand lettered.

TG for CADD

😉

F. Henry Sipe was an interesting and complex character. His background and training was in forestry. In fact he had a master’s degree in forestry from Yale University. He was retired from the US Forest Service. He approached surveying strictly from a boundary point of view, not an engineering point of view. He was a strong proponent of compass land surveying and was the co-inventor of the Sipe-Summner Compass. He strongly believed that surveys should be accurate but that precision was a waste of time and money. While he was on the Board it reprimanded several surveyors for charging too high a fee and for using equipment that was inappropriate and too expensive for the job. When I applied to take the WV exam in 1978 I submitted a survey I had worked on, together with a description and a report of survey. The equipment we used was a Wild T-2 and HP 3800 distance meter. From your set up you had to turn the angles and measure the distances as a separate operation. Henry as Secretary of the Board wrote me a letter admonishing me for using such expensive equipment for a rural survey and telling me that it was the Board’s opinion that I did not yet have the judgment necessary to be a surveyor and that I could not take the exam. I wrote back telling him that the land we surveyed was being sold for $5000 per acre (a high price then) and that since I was an employee I used the equipment provided by my employer and since the company I worked for was small (5 employees), it only had one set of equipment. Henry wrote back and said that the Board had reconsidered that that I could take the upcoming exam. Pricing was something Henry and I could never agree on. I thought and still think that price is none of the Board’s business, unless fraud is involved. I used to kid Henry, after I got to know him better, that he thought surveyors had to take a vow of poverty before they could get a license.

Wow... Thank you for sharing that. Very interesting indeed.

1. Sight through the vanes along the line to be surveyed.
2. Read the needle for bearing.
a. Estimate the nearest 5 minutes.
3. Write down bearing in field book.
4. Move to other end of line.
5. Repeat steps 1-3
6. Repeat steps 1-5 on all lines.
When complete, you should have a 1:1000 or better closure.B-)