New Orleans unit of distance measurement "Line"

Number 2.

Common in downtown business district, I think.

I know little to nothing about any New Orleans units. As for "lines", they vary according to your reference material.

I've got an old 19th. Century "Joiner's" (cabinmaker's) handbook here (somewhere) I was going to scan the page for you. But it's not where I remember it being...

Anyway, feet, inches and lines are designated as 1' 2'' 3''' as 1 foot, 2 inches, 3 lines. A line, by my "joinery" reference material was 1/12th. of an inch.

I have read other material that set a line as 1/8 of an inch and others called for 1/10 of an inch.

good luck

Common to New Orleans area and other areas of LA.
Really spelled 'ligne' and is perpetuated by the D'Hemocourt street and block maps of the city.
Pronunciation is "lean"
A ligne is 1/8"

It annotated by '''

first time I have heard 0.004417 referred to as Vast!

Thank you for the help folks- greatly appreciated!

Best~

Chuck

Obviously, +/- 0.04' right?;-)

LOL- yup that pesky 0.04' we keep bantering about here.

uh, that's .004' 🙂

plat showing ''' as lignes

Yup- that was done "tongue in cheek" 😉

Thanks Robert!

I thought it said "Rampant Love" until I looked twice...;-)

A line is what fits in the straw the best without making a mess. :-$

When units of measure were devised by the viziers instead of revolutionary commoners it was the practice to make them both accessible and useful in trade.

As a result many units had easy to find local references (cubit = forearm or inch = 3 barleycorn), which may vary some from place to place but useful in each locale.

The second result was that subdivisions were used with as many useful factors as possible, which lead to many useful units as multiples of 12 (12 inches/foot, 5x12 minutes/hour). 12 has 5 useful factors of 2, 3, 4, & 6. This is opposed to the "common" sense notion that 10 is best because we have 10 fingers and in our nomenclature we may divide or multiply by moving a decimal point. 10 has only 2 useful factors of 2, & 5.

All of that is background for the original values of a line. The pounce (Paris inch) was divided by 12 ligne (Paris line) and 12 pounce made a pied du roi (royal foot) and 6 pied du roi made a toise (similar to a English fathom) and 220 pied du roi made an arpent. The pied, pounce and ligne would be abbreviated with the prime symbol ( ? ), double prime symbol ( ? ), and triple prime symbol ( ? ) respectively.

pounce = 12 ligne
pied du roi = 12 pounce
toise = 6 pied du roi
arpent = 220 pied du roi

Over time regional variations in the "standard" values of these crept in and in la Nouvelle-Orléans the impossibility of making regular land measures to 1/12th inch lead to assumptions on the part of those who didn't know the history to simply use 1/8 marks on a tape/ruler and so the practice of assigning 1/8 in to ? instead of 1/12 occurred.

As Paul Harvey used to say, "now you know the rest of the story" or at least some more of it.

JAC