In the corner of my office are some items found monumenting corners, a 4' auger, boiler flue, concrete monument w/brass pin (called for in a deed), and an iron bar with an iron cap. I am sure most of us have found assorted pipes, stones, mounds, grater blades, coil springs, gun barrels, bottles, wood posts, etc. While I did not find them myself, a county surveyor in Oregon removed a whale vertebrae which was set as a triangulation station after placing an iron monument, and I spoke with a federal surveyor that had a call for an anchor at the corner, which was found, and was about 300 miles from a river or the sea.
What is the most interesting item you have seen or found as "the monument"?
Rear axle out of an automobile including the spindle and five or six lug bolts still in place. First thing to appear was threads on a bolt. Thought to see how long the bolt was and discovered the rest of the monument. The surveyor who laid out that little rural subdivision owned a salvage yard. Every lot corner was the same.
One of my other favorites was a limestone a foot or two deep below a county road with a horse shoe on it keeping it from splitting any further.
A Maytag washing machine agitator
DDSM
I'm always intrigued by the imaginary ones the land owner knows are there but can't find. Mostly because they never existed.
Nowadays I like the ones where a potential client hands you a map with a bunch of lats & longs and says that those are where the corners go.
Never heard of cotton picker spindles until I moved out here. Pretty tough and can be driven into very hard ground much easier than a 5/8 rebar. Nobody uses them anymore (not to specs), but there are lots around.
Used to find all sorts of axle shafts, plow points, big long pipes sticking above the water level in swamps, assorted cedar posts and other old relics back in MI though. All called out in the old survey records. Kinda cool.
Perfect! For a while they were probably common at the salvage yard and thus much less expensive than Berntsen breakaway. The base would stay pretty solid if the top was hit. And you can bet no one is going to pull it with their vice grips.
Cotton spindles are still used widely. Especially in places where significant power tools would be needed to embed a full-length monument into bedrock or rebar-filled concrete. No one is ever going to see more than about the top 1/4" of what is set, anyway.
That reminds me of the 30" rebar that was placed in a drilled hole in a culvert top that was only about 8" thick. The rest of it was helping to catch trash and contribute to blocking flow through that small culvert. Looked like some booksmart idiot had put it there. There was enough rebar in the culvert itself to make searching with a metal detector futile.
An 1800's cannon barrel set vertical in a rock pile. It marked one of the corner of the USMA at West Point and the Black Rock Forest. I was sworn to secrecy as to its existence, but unfortunately a number of years later the staff of the museum found out about it, and removed it to the West Point Museum. Wish I had gotten a picture of it.
Quite a few Chrysler torsion bars, a plow share called for, a double barrel shotgun barrel set in a tree by the elderly landowner and a uncalled for meat grinder. Since the grinder was on line and was very close to three other corners bearings/distances I held it to set a corner and called off a railroad spike in the road. That was for a senior parcel out of two adjoiners and it matched their geometry.
Best find was a combination of calls. Adjoiner deed called for a clump of trees, P.Q. called for a large rock, found a 3' high rock with 8 1" trees growing out the top, held it for corner and set another corner pipe in the middle of a bend in a 4' wide 2' deep stream bend exactly 99 feet away.
Paul in PA
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Paul in PA
A "gun barrel" in a really screwed up part of town, where none of the metes and bounds tracts "fit", but if you find the gun barrel, you are good.
Notes called for a "whiskey bottle" next to stone and brass cap. Brass cap is there, but the whiskey bottle has not been found.
ww co pls
- Have a nice day! Or, may your monument prevail over some guy's touchscreen.
>a double barrel shotgun barrel
Pincushioned when originally monumented.
A screw driver. Called for in a survey and it actually checked well. The handle was shot, but the blade was still there.
The old time surveyor, John Brendla, scored a large number of gun barrels from the Naval Air Station in Fort Lauderdale after WWII and set those around the airport and in Davie for years.
I've an old peg off King Island (off north Tasmania) that was placed on the sand dunes marking the foreshore boundary for early land grants in late 1800's.
It is teak and only way that could have been was from a shipwreck which King Island was unfortunately infamous for. Many tragedies and one had a sense of great sadness when surveying those coasts.
As pegs etc were scarce the early surveyors would use anything available and bottles were a common boundary mark and a reference to the corners.
Even if they got smashed it was often easy to find the centre of the remains.
I've seen many old axles and used them myself.
Once I found a buried old iron bar that had some old bones placed above it.
Old large files are sometimes found.
I reuse old railway spikes out of sleepers. They make fantastic marks in bitumen surfaces.
Anything worthy of a solid long lasting mark is fair game for me.
"Hardwood Boundpost"
Lignum Vitae (Tree of Life) log 4" x 4" x 2-3' long.
Set by Danes in 19th century. There are a few on St. John that I know of.
Even before the plantation period, Europeans were interested in the tropical hardwood that is impervious to rot or worms to use for shipbuilding. Good for survey monuments, too.
The infamous octagonal rifle barrel
Not far from one of our sparkly new casinos sits an octagonal gun barrel marking a "center 1/16th" corner. Adjacent to an aged and weathered rail tie corner post.
Although no recorded pedigree exists for its placement, the barrel has been used for a corner monument since the thirties. As testified by the grandson of the original allotment recipient. Surveys and testimony dating back to the fifties corroborate the monument as the accepted corner.
A few years ago the "highway boyz" came through and subdivided the section with a bearing-bearing intersect (on paper) and set a new monument some thirty feet away from the barrel. BTW, the section was originally subdivided in 40 acre allotments known as the "three-mile method". This caused a minor uproar that took almost five years to blossom into a full-growed court case. One of my associates, all the previous owners that were alive, five other surveyors and ODOT all wound up in a court room.
Among the any "miscarriages" in that court room was the non-existent testimony of the surveyor that "set" the monument. The State sent the surveyor's supervisor to testify...someone who had never actually been "on the ground" out there. And when pressed about the "improper" procedure ODOT used (bearing-bearing) when retracing the original survey; the supervisor testified their procedure was what the manual says to do now.
The judge ruled the new ODOT corner was the "center of section" because they're the highway department and everything they do is right....
After two years my associate will still get up on fence post and crow about how wrong everything turned out in regards to this case. While I agree the judge miscarried justice and the defendant should appeal, we are all getting sick of hearing about the infamous "gun barrel" around the office.
So in that sense, that barrel has to be THE prominent corner monument I know of..:pinch:
Some of the other items were different but not unusual. I am one of those square, box surveyor's (Sections). Whilst visiting my Gran'Pappy in the proud state of NC, I asked him if he knew where his corners were and he explained that the seller "beat the bounds" with him when he bought it in the 1920's. It ran from a "hickory tree, due west to the branch". I was hiking to a cousins when I spotted some flagging hanging in a tree and started to investigate the "metes and bounds" brush line. When in a forest of hickories, how do you know which one? There was flagging on a small snag with 3'-4' of flint stones piled around it with the brush line leading to a small branch(Pacific Northwesterners substitute the word "crick") and in the center, under about 4" of water, an X was chiseled in the crick bed. Interesting.
Read a BT book in Oregon where the surveyor changed the monument from a 1917 Chevrolet axle description to a 1929 Cadillac axle. Like I would know the difference.
A distance and bearing call to a 7' diameter bolder "with a mark like this (X)". Seemed simple since it was on the edge of a field by the railroad tracks in an area with cottonwoods, ivy, and blackberries. Crawled in on my hands and knees under the blackberries and bumped my head into a headstone of a pioneer cemetery. Found five 7' rocks covered with ivy, brushed off the tops of all of them without finding any X. Looked at the old cursive notes again and looked on the bearing face of the first one and found a crucifix carved into the rock. Scooooooooooore!!!!!
A call to an octagon brass rod 2.5' out of the ground. No iron detector of any use here. Chained into the area when the chainman tripped and rolled through the poison oak. Guess what he tripped over? I bought him a beer to make up for the weeks of itching.
A toilet. Actually 4 toilets, one at each corner of a guys 40 acre parcel. He was a plumber and apparently felt this was a good use for the used ones. And yes, the toilet is witness to a pincushion. And no, I didn't look in it...
I've seen grader blades galore, but nothing like this rake (or whatever it is). This implement wasn't called for, but the distances matched two concrete monuments and two witness trees.
Triangulation surveys by the Tczarist Russian Military throughout Russia were monumented with empty glass vodka bottles buried under targets built with wood scantling. Since peasants pirated the scantling for firewood, 100% of the old triangulation stations have been lost.
I think my favorite monuments came from a subdivision staked in 1979. The surveyor had a new fangled top mounted EDM on a nice wild instrument. He decided he could run his office and crews and do these "little" jobs by going out in the afternoon and stake them himself.
Problem was it was a bit too much for one guy, he often left something back at the office like the rebar and caps. So he would set whatever was available, intending to go back and replace the temporary monument.
Years later running the lines for two lots, I found a screwdriver, 60 penny nail, chisel, and the best monument of all a mechanical pencil, which to this day is my favorite, very proud of myself that I found that one, the others were found with a detector, but that one took some real effort.;-)
