PLSS questions about your home territory

I have found hundreds of marked original GLO stones. Most have been buried under roads with perhaps 10-percent of those found in fields. The real question for me is whether the GLO stone is in its "original place"? We typically accept them where found, but they were originally placed 1/3 above the ground, so why are they now buried under roads?

I have found early records where the road maintenance crews were instructed to bury the stones when they came across them with road graders. I doubt that they tied them out or put them 'exactly' where found, but merely dug a hole and dropped them in. This explains why I have often found them rotated, upside down and even on their sides well buried.

In the vast areas where stones were not used, but rather pits & mound with stakes, the frequency of recovery goes way down, but a lot of that is due to surveyors not taking the proper steps or time to search for evidence.

I've done seminars on the short cut methods used by GLO surveyors. The modern surveyors are usually not looking in the right locations, therefore nothing is found.

My "woods" ,as I call the area I work, entail a four or five county area. This area is split in the middle by a river that just happens to be the boundary between "Oklahoma Territory" and "Indian Territory". Surveyed at different times, and usually in different ways, keeps things interesting. Some of the "original" surveys were not completed until the late 1800s to early 1900s.

I probably catch wind of two or three existing corners a year that get discovered. The majority of these are bearing trees. Occasionally a stone or post is recovered. The "find" rate is greater in the SE part of Oklahoma due to the terrain and the inability to maintain a roadbed on a straight line in the hills. Down there plenty of pull posts have a stone in the immediate vicinity just waiting to be discovered.

As JP up Nebraska way has shown us there are plenty of original monuments that were buried by competent surveyors when the county began their task of building and maintaining the roadbeds. Same here in Oklahoma. Trouble being the records were either never produced or have been lost.

From my highway department days I know for a fact that a lot of the corners were buried. Kay, Grant, Woods, Alfalfa, Garfield and Kingfisher are a few of the counties that had someone that actively buried the original monumentation as the roads were built. Those corners are still there.

Here's the catch. I (and a crew) have actually been arrested for "destruction of public property" while trying to dig up some corners. Folks think your crazy. It's possible to dig on some graded dirt backroads (if the deputy doesn't live nearby) but opening a hole in either an AC or double-bit road surface requires some cash and permission. Sadly, most surveyors (including myself) depend on the filed references and the harmony of the GLO notes with the occupation to identify corner locations. :bored:

Found lots of them-even two x's in bedrock, there are plenty out here waiting to be recovered. We don't have the county road along the section line issue very often and usually there are big cut/fill sections at the corners. But, I do have a couple of dug up road corners and found a number of 1907 brass caps buried in the road in a "newer" original township.

Also a number of counties have pretty good "original" CR stones referencing the original section/quarter corner monuments.

One of the original crosses in bedrock:

Same corner after drilling in a cap at the x:

Somewhere around here I have a clipping from the hometown newspaper in southern Iowa where an old geezer was reminiscing about things and mentioned that he worked for the county surveyor in the 1930's.

He said they were digging up the old section corner stones and "putting them where they belonged". If this guy stated it accurately, that surveyor was redistributing the original measurement errors in a direction that would tend to square up the sections.

I hope they were really just lowering them in preparation for road work.

Those stones were not original. The notes mostly call for post and mound. One of my g-g-great-uncles was county surveyor for decades in the 1800's and probably put a lot of those stones in to perpetuate the original corners.

The county has a corner record book with ties to crossed nails in fence posts, etc. that goes back long before the state started requiring corner records. I doubt they are maintaining that now as fences get replaced. I have swung a magnetic locator at a very few rural intersections by our family's land, and find that there must be a rod or railroad spike there, but also at a quarter corner (not on a twp line) that I could find no signal and the fences don't line up across the road.

I talked to a surveyor from a couple counties away, and he said he tries not to work in my home county because there is so little to work from. I think he meant surveyed breakdowns of sections.

There are very few around here (Lower Alabama). There are very few stones in this part of the country so mostly squared-off lightwood posts were set at the section and 1/2-section corners.
I did recover one a couple years ago and the previous surveyor and adjacent landowners understood the importance of it as they caged it with 3" iron pipes around it and a stainless steel plate over the top of it with the Section #'s and owners initials "welded" on the top. Had to shoot offsets to locate it, but it's not going anywhere. It was located in a swamp bottom.
Due to all the timber land down here, many of the section corners, 1/2-s.corners and 40-corners are not in due to all the logging. They are not real careful about the corners when they are cutting and hauling trees out, especially if the timber company or landowner owns all the property around said corners.
Swamp bottoms are the best place to find such corners though as these areas don't grow pines and are often undisturbed. VERY few are original though.

Found a dozen or so during my summer work at the Forest service while in college.:-) I used to think it was more prevalent but now a days know that many originals are long gone and or definitely have been moved, replaced, or reset by someone since the GLO set them.:-/ Im sure if I had an inclination to find more I could just go traipsing through some of our local National forest land we have around here.:stakeout:

Most of the original surveying around here (NE Wisconsin) was done in the 1860's - 1870's with the corners being marked by a wood post, referenced to bearing trees. As expected, very few of those exist today but if you do get in the right spot in an area of undisturbed swamp, you can still find evidence... sometimes the point of a wood post, sometimes a bearing tree that fell over and has been preserved by the fact its always in water. Fortunately, there were a few good surveyors around the turn of the century who could still find original evidence and would often set marked stones to preserve the location. When I run across a stone in the records and I know it hasn't been searched for, I'll go take a look. As long as our highway department has the digging technology, I take advantage of it. This is one I found last week. The 1917 record that I had said it was set by a previous surveyor - notes of which I don't have. It was a good find.


I set the pipe alongside the stone so as to help someone down the road recover the stone. There will be a corner restoration sheet filed showing that fact... that the stone still marks the corner, not the pipe, along with reference markers set and County coordinates on the corner.

I've been surveying for 30 years and licensed for 22 years and I've never found one. My general area was surveyed around 1817 and were a post in a mound. I often joke and say it was more likely a stick in a pile of dirt. I do find stones, a few every year but they were set latter by the county surveyors.

I got excited once and found a fairly large pile of dirt near a corner of a township. I thought I had found an original corner but it turned out to be out of place by several hundred feet.

My first 20 years or so surveying were MO, NY, IL, TN, KY, AL, GA, TX and overseas. I can count the GLO stones I found in that period without taking my shoes off. Lot's of US Survey stuff but very little PLSS. Moving to the northwest changed that.

I work mostly ID, OR and UT now, with an occasional foray into some of the others around here. We are usually fielding 2 crews. It is rare not to have an original stone tied out every few weeks. We break out sections for the first time on record on a regular basis.

In the late 70's as the States pushed standards our population was next to nothing. Recording and Corner Perpetuation requirements were on the books before things got ravaged too bad. All of the circumstances have come together to launch my career forward and make Surveying fun again. The move to Idaho was a good decision...

If you found a GLO stone in KY, TN and NY, you are most definitely a master surveyor.

I would be interested in knowing if anyone alive in the State of Mississippi has found an original GLO corner.

We are around NY and I can say I have never found a federal government monument other than specific property corners on federal property (around West Point). I have found plenty of DOT monuments but you don't hold those because they were not set by surveyors. I have found NYC monuments (I used to work for the NYC DEP).

In the woods upstate you find plenty of old original monuments but down towards NYC you rarely ever find original monuments. Most are 200+ years old and it's questionable if many were even set...and if they were they were ripped up by landscapers long ago. Even with more recent stuff you see monuments called on the map but the surveyor never set them...the town required it on the map but they the developer never paid so the surveyor never set.

> For your specific neighborhood, how often do you encounter what you believe to be an original monument set by the Government survey crew?

We've located 36 of the 40 stones originally set by Andrew Ellicott to mark The Territory of Columbia; I'm going to go with that counts as being set by a "government survey crew".

Or you were following a really bad GLO Surveyor. ..:-)

I have found a few, but very few. The nicest one was on the Tishomingo - Itawamba county line: A heart pine "stake" , with the top 8 inches or so squared off, chamfered on top, and sharpened to facilitate driving into the ground, with the section numbers scribed on the squared portion. It was seated in a small rock mound, rotated to where the numbers were pointing toward the appropriate sections. It was in a swampy area.

I had a picture of it, but can't find it. I posted it on the old "pob" board a few years ago. Someone had tied flagging all over it. They were proud if it, too. I have a survey to do in that section coming up. I'll try to take another picture of it if it's still there.

Most of the others I've found were not in that good shape. I don't think I've found another that you could read the scribing. They were all fairly short. Before I had found any, I had pictured them being knee to waist high "posts", but they kept them short to keep from being knocked down by cattle and such, as per Fitz's instructions. Most were in a small rock pile or mound, if they were available in the area.

I've also found a few bearing trees. Well, actually two that were alive that I was confident about, and a few dead ones, stumps, or remnants that fit.

I haven't found an original in Alabama, yet, that I knew for sure was original. I have found several stone mounds or rock piles that I felt were original, though.

That stake is awfully close to where I'm from, about 50 miles or so due South.

We've done a few surveys in the delta the past few years. Original corners over there are as lost as last years Easter egg.

All the time, but our PLSS is much more recent than most. Most of the townships around here were surveyed between 1914-1917. Standard set around here was 1-2" iron pipe with a 2" GLO brass cap pinned on. Rarely was a stone called for in the notes. Recovering original BT's from that time is a bit more of a problem as the trees here just don't live all that long. I'm frequently amazed at the accuracy these early surveyors achieved in some really rough and unforgiving country. They were a much tougher bunch back then and I sometimes feel like a little school kid running around with my little GPS receivers trying to get in those old timers foot prints. All in all I have it pretty easy compared to some of you. :-/

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What is a G-L-O? 😉 B-)

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:good: 😉