> The two main candidates as series of side lot line lengths determined by Trimble and Lindsey in 1837 are both within 0.5 chain on all lengths in the series from Lot 10 to Lot 502, with the East line of Lot 502 being either 29.0 or 29.5 chains in length (1914 ft. or 1947 ft.) per their plat.
>
I'm not sure I follow the 29 or 29.5 chains, I agree they are measured as trapezoids but isn't 31 acres 31 chains (2046') x 10 chains?
They must have had a pretty good idea of the coast line as lots 526 - 524 have water on both sides and they still gave the acreage to the nearest acre.
The legend states acreage to nearest 0.01 acre
> They must have had a pretty good idea of the coast line as lots 526 - 524 have water on both sides and they still gave the acreage to the nearest acre.
>
> The legend states acreage to nearest 0.01 acre
The way that I think the legend makes sense is to distinguish acres and fractions of an acre from acres, roods, and perches, which in the practice of the time were also written in a somewhat similar manner with a period separating them.
On the detail of the same part of the 1837 map, I've added in yellow the most efficient traverse to have laid out Lots 10 through 502 in order to both mark their corners and also be able to compute fairly accurate areas. Naturally, by "efficient" I mean computationally efficient as well as in terms of field work.
> I'm not sure I follow the 29 or 29.5 chains, I agree they are measured as trapezoids but isn't 31 acres 31 chains (2046') x 10 chains?
Here's the way that the logic goes. If you calculate the areas of the littoral lots as trapezoids, you have to know the lengths of both sides and, if you assume the length of one side, then you can calcuate the length of the other from the area. From that side, you can calculate the next side of the next lot from its stated area, and so on.
These six series of side lengths all produce the lot areas given on the plat, but some of the series are more plausible than others given other information about the shoreline as presented on the plat. That is, if you plot them out, some produce a shoreline that really doesn't look like what's on the plat and some do. Series 4 and 5 fall into that second category and so are most likely.
[pre]
Series 1 2 3 4 5 6
WBL 502 34.5 34.0 33.5 33.0 32.5 32.0
502/51 27.5 28.0 28.5 29.0 29.5 30.0
51/50 30.5 30.0 29.5 29.0 28.5 28.0
50/31 25.5 26.0 26.5 27.0 27.5 28.0
31/30 30.0 29.5 29.0 28.5 28.0 27.5
30/11 24.0 24.5 25.0 25.5 26.0 26.5
11/10 24.0 23.5 23.0 22.5 22.0 21.5
EBL 10 22.0 22.5 23.0 23.5 24.0 24.5
[/pre]
> > They must have had a pretty good idea of the coast line as lots 526 - 524 have water on both sides and they still gave the acreage to the nearest acre.
> >
> > The legend states acreage to nearest 0.01 acre
>
> The way that I think the legend makes sense is to distinguish acres and fractions of an acre from acres, roods, and perches, which in the practice of the time were also written in a somewhat similar manner with a period separating them.
>
> On the detail of the same part of the 1837 map, I've added in yellow the most efficient traverse to have laid out Lots 10 through 502 in order to both mark their corners and also be able to compute fairly accurate areas. Naturally, by "efficient" I mean computationally efficient as well as in terms of field work.
>
>
I was not looking at the overall picture.
The math works out if the common line between Lot 50 and 51 is 28 chains, 51 and 502 is 30 chains, and 502 and 505 is 32 chains. That makes the math simple with Lot 502 being a rectangle of 30 chains by 10 chains (30 acres) plus a right triangle of 2 chains by 10 chains (1 acre) etc... I think a lot more work went into this survey than I had thought, for example I can't explain the 13.85 acres of Lot 31 or the other odd acreages along the coast.
I want to learn more about the methods used for this survey and the calculations of the areas. I found a inventory of the William Lindsey papers in State Archives, some of which pertain to the survey of Galveston Island. Hopefully some of these are online.
> >
>
> I think a lot more work went into this survey than I had thought, for example I can't explain the 13.85 acres of Lot 31 or the other odd acreages along the coast.
The 13.85 acres is explained as the area of a trapezoidal lot with a width of 5 chains and an average side length of 27.7 chains, which would be 27.75 chains rounded down to the nearest 0.1 acre. The average of 27.75 chains is a natural result when the sides are measured to the nearest 1/2 chain.
If you consider the fieldwork, measuring with a 2-pole chain (if you're going to measure in chains instead of varas to simplify area calculations) it would be natural to record in units of 2-pole chains so that the offsets to the shoreline would be in single-digit integers instead of fractions.
> I found a inventory of the William Lindsey papers in State Archives, some of which pertain to the survey of Galveston Island. Hopefully some of these are online.
>
>> http://www.lib.utexas.edu/taro/tslac/40059/tsl-40059.htmlbr >
I don't think that they're online, but I'm going to take a look at the William Lindsey papers just to see what they comprise.
His son, Andrew M. Lindsey, was County Surveyor of Hays County in the 1850's and was really quite a good surveyor for the day. My assumption has been that he learned from his father and that his father was equally competent. As I recall, William Lindsey laid out the Post Road from San Antonio to Austin in the 1840's for the Republic of Texas.
The early Galveston engineer/surveyor R.W. Luttrell reported finding wood posts at some of the lot corners in this part of Section 1 in 1899 and noted that the lot numbers had been cut into them in Roman numerals, which sounds very much like what I'd expect for what Lindsey would have left for corners in 1837.
A strange thing about the T&L layout is that it has a north-south road coast to coast every 1320 feet but not a single east-west connecting road. I guess they expected everyone to take a boat to the bayside and travel across the island.
This is an 1867 Richardson map of the City of Galveston combined with the Trimble and Lindsey Survey and shows the azimuth of the north-south line established by W.G. Banks as S24 deg 30 min E. I have located modern lines (occupied) in T&L Sec. 2 and found the NAD83 TSC grid bearing to be 27 deg 01 min.
> This is an 1867 Richardson map of the City of Galveston combined with the Trimble and Lindsey Survey and shows the azimuth of the north-south line established by W.G. Banks as S24 deg 30 min E. I have located modern lines (occupied) in T&L Sec. 2 and found the NAD83 TSC grid bearing to be 27 deg 01 min.
R.W. Luttrell's work around 1900 reported bearings that appear to be essentially correct true bearings in Section 1.
BTW I did examine the Lindsey family papers today and can report they contain relatively little pertaining to the survey of Galveston Island aside from a contract between Trimble and Lindsey to the effect that they would both share the expenses and profits of the survey of Galveston Island. That and a letter of protest from Hall claiming that he had a prior right to the land that was being cut up into lots.
Sorry to hear not more on the survey. I guess Hall did have a prior claim as parts of T&L Sec 2 is out of the Hall-Jones Survey.
