American Surveyor has another excellent Chad Erickson article in the current issue...
http://www.amerisurv.com/PDF/TheAmericanSurveyor_Erickson-LocatorsTheLostWorld_Vol10No8.pdf
I learned a lot from it.
> American Surveyor has another excellent Chad Erickson article in the current issue...
>
>> http://www.amerisurv.com/PDF/TheAmericanSurveyor_Erickson-LocatorsTheLostWorld_Vol10No8.pdf
>
> I learned a lot from it.
It sounds as if there have been realtors telling buyers that the power pole is the corner for quite some time. :>
There were men who advertised themselves as locators or land agents in Texas, but usually that meant that they would arrange to have land certificates located by the County Surveyor or one of his deputies (who not infrequently in West Texas was one of the locator's staff). Land was very cheap in Texas and between 1870 and 1889 there was quite a bit of land scrip that has been issued to railroad companies and river contractors that was sold practically the day after it was issued and ended up in the hands of a variety of people who thought they would go into the ranching business in Texas.
In West Texas, these land agents typically were locating twenty or fifty sections at a time, one alternate section for the State for every private section located by virtue of a scrip. I suspect that there was a fair amount of chicanery in how the quality of the land and its propects of surface water were represented to the would-be ranchers in Massachusetts who had contracted with the locator.