backhoe work
> I am scheduling a backhoe to search for one of those in a county road intersection within the next few weeks...
Back when I was a government employee my crews did a long job on US177 up near Braman, OK. that terminated at the Kansas line.
There were a butt-load of section corners to locate since the highway ran at a NW-SE diagonal. I put my best crew on it and started working on other things.
At the end of the week I assumed that they had pretty much covered the entire area with a "search and rescue" for land corners. I asked the crew chief how far along he was. He told me they had five corners (out of thirty or more) recovered. I was livid. I started getting mad and telling him they needed to pick up the pace.
He told me some of them were over six feet deep...and then went on to explain he was from that part of the county and knew it well. Apparently all the original monuments had been buried by the county surveyor at the time the roads were cut-in. Nothing of record usually, but just common knowledge in a local area.
Well, his cousin was the equipment operator for the county maintenance. They had been using the county's rubber tire JD to dig up all the original corners and get references.
I wasn't mad anymore. It took four more weeks and we dug up a mess of them with the county's help (and diesel). I spent some "supervisor" time out there watching. It was a blast.
A lot of those are still in, just waiting for someone that knows how to dig...:snarky:
Well, how could I not see them before? LOL. They're as plain as the nose on my face now.
backhoe work
It is slow and tedious work, but necessary. What I particularly detest is the presence of utilities where none should have ever been placed as they really mess up doing a proper dig.
One of my favorite finds involved using a county backhoe where the client was a county commissioner. He was onsite the whole time, which made the backhoe operator extra nervous. Fortunately, we found exactly what we were seeking. The notes said it was a sandstone placed horizontally above limestone bedrock and marked with an "X" of a certain size. Got lucky and didn't drag it at all. Whew!
Typically the notes will say 30.00 top spur, 64.00 cross wash, I would say that not only are the majority an even chain distance, but are mostly at exactly a ten chain dimension. What that says about the length of the chain.........
> Typically the notes will say 30.00 top spur, 64.00 cross wash, I would say that not only are the majority an even chain distance, but are mostly at exactly a ten chain dimension.
If they are pretty much all at even ten chain stations, then it sounds as if (a) a four-pole chain was in use and (b) the compass or transitman was keeping track of the outs and if there was some notable topo feature whenever a ten-chain tally was made, then the topo feature was more likely to get recorded.
> Typically the notes will say 30.00 top spur, 64.00 cross wash, I would say that not only are the majority an even chain distance, but are mostly at exactly a ten chain dimension.
I've heard Mouland and others remark that this type of topo call situation was generally the result of the chainmen reporting/recalling the calls back at camp at the end of the day.... this in conjunction with the idea of not heavily weighting terrain calls further that 5 chains from the corner...
- Kent's scenario above addresses this also...
How "lined up" are they? Like they had a really nice long actual east/west line of sight and the just chained it straight out for a couple of miles? How many total corners have you recovered in the township?
> I've heard Mouland and others remark that this type of topo call situation was generally the result of the chainmen reporting/recalling the calls back at camp at the end of the day....
I'm having some difficulty imagining the party so spread out, i.e. instrument so far ahead of the chainmen, that the chainmen would need to keep their own record of chainage for passing topo features. I suppose it could happen, but it sounds like a recipe for much worse things happening.
So, if the instrument was within earshot of the instrument, I'd think you'd want the transit man/compass man keeping track of the "outs" as 10-chain increments accumulated. There was an eight-increment (80 chain) outkeeper on many or most compasses and it was presumably there for a useful purpose.
> > I've heard Mouland and others remark that this type of topo call situation was generally the result of the chainmen reporting/recalling the calls back at camp at the end of the day....
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> I'm having some difficulty imagining the party so spread out, i.e. instrument so far ahead of the chainmen, that the chainmen would need to keep their own record of chainage for passing topo features. I suppose it could happen, but it sounds like a recipe for much worse things happening.
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I don't necessarily think it was so much a matter of being spread out as much as not considered important- $4/mile contract surveying- how much time was spent worrying about accurate topo calls in the early surveys- In my experience- not much- most of the 1880's surveys we see around here were sorely lacking. lots of 40.00 ch... 80.00 chains...
> I don't necessarily think it was so much a matter of being spread out as much as not considered important- $4/mile contract surveying- how much time was spent worrying about accurate topo calls in the early surveys-
It's true that if the lines were run in some other direction than as reported, reversing the chainage on the passing calls would have just been more arithmetical work when the notes were drawn up. But if the party wasn't that spread out, how much extra work would it have been for the tail chainman to have called out the number of pins he was holding when some feature was passed?
I think one obvious problem was that if you're taking shortcuts and give lots of detail on some lines actually run, the lines without an equivalent level of detail stand out as candidates for not actually having been run and closed. So, the object was to sprinkle in enough topo calls to convince an examiner, but not so many as to cast doubt on the rest of the work.
In this township I would conclude that topo calls were not measured at all.
Except for the very close calls near a monument, otherwise they don't make much sense.
And there aren't many anyway.
They probably sat at the campsite and said, hey we went up hill from that corner then down to the 1/4 so lets put top of ridge at 20 chains.
Many of the miles run had no calls and this is in break country so there were endless calls that could have been made.
To illustrate here is a picture of the east line of Section 16:
the topo calls along this line are:
50.00 chains cross wash
not perfect by any means;-)
They'd have had better results if those GLO guys would have dimpled the tops of the stones....
Those old guys knew better;-)
:good:
