One thing that is distinctive about Texas surveying is that the original land grants were usually all made by metes and bounds from many different surveys over time. One of the more important things that the Texas GLO did was to compile maps of all of the various pieces of the patchwork to show the resulting pattern of land grants. This was to keep general track of where the many different grants were located and to show any scraps of unsurveyed public land that remained. In the case of the Official Dimmit County Map, it turns out that the exercise failed fairly spectacularly as a result of a faulty compilation.
Here is how it began. In 1874, a surveyor named Jacob Kuechler located various surveys and made this map showing what he thought their relationships to be:
Kuechler 1874 Map
This map was evidently used in compiling this 1875 Official County Map of Dimmit County in the GLO:
1875 Official Dimmit Co. Map
That was fine until about 1884 when a gross error was discovered in how Mr. Kuechler's surveys were actually located on the ground. While Kuechler's field notes called for the SW corner of the Henry Castro Survey to be the NW corner of the Stewart Newell Survey, it turned out that he was merely speculating that where he had located that corner of the Castro was that corner of the Newell. He admitted that he hadn't actually found the NW corner of the Newell Survey but was relying upon the courses and distances he had run from another distant corner in thinking that the corners were the same. They weren't.
So, as new field notes of surveys covering the unsurveyed land that Mr. Kuechler had left along the West side of the Newell Survey came into the GLO, the county map was revised:
1894 Official Dimmit Co. Map
Note that the GLO draftsman who compiled the above map didn't apparently believe that Mr. Kuechler had in fact never been at the NW corner of the Newell Survey and his adjoiner call continues as a sort of Urban Legend even though the manuscript version of the 1894 map even has a penciled notation giving the file number where Kuechler's affidavit stating otherwise can still be found in the GLO.
Note the double-headed leader at the NW corner of the Carl Kirchner indicating that it was really the same corner as the NE corner of Survey 630 beside it, but the compiling draftsman hadn't evidently figured out which was correctly plotted.
By 1916, that last problem was solved:
1916 Official Dimmit Co. Map
Note the double-headed arrows that indicate that the compiling draftsman recognized that the East line of the Kirchner Survey was the West line of the Castro Survey, but that the draftsman didn't know which was correctly drawn on the map.
Fast forward to 2013 and even though it is quite possible to answer that last question from USGS topographic maps and information on file in the GLO, the online GIS shows a blank space between the Kirchner and Castro as if it were a vacancy.
And here is what the online GIS looks like, complete with Terra Incognita (only now missing any indication that the blank space doesn't actually exist.
GLO GIS
And here is what a correct compilation of the Official Dimmit County Map from the records actually on file in the GLO and topo features from USGS 7.5-minute quad maps would look like.
Correct Official Dimmit County Map
Note that one entire land grant, the John J. McLeland Survey No. 530, Abstract 1314 (patented in 1887) had disappeared from the GLO maps as if the draftsman used a Bermuda Triangle to draw lines. If you query the GLO GIS for A-1314, it points you to a little nub of the John J. McLeland Survey No. 529, Abstract 1315 (also patented in 1887). Querying the GIS for A-1315 returns the equivalent of "huh?".
Yeap, about right.
Those old surveyors that did the surveying when the domain was being carved up were about like the medical doctors of the time, you got sick with anything serious, YOU DIED.
There were so many paper surveys during that period, that its unreal.
> Those old surveyors that did the surveying when the domain was being carved up were about like the medical doctors of the time, you got sick with anything serious, YOU DIED.
In this case, Jacob Kuechler did mark enough corners on the ground that later surveyors could follow his work on the lines he actually ran. From the field notes that he filed, you can mostly tell from his calls for bearing trees at corners and passing calls which lines he actually ran and which were protracted to fictitious "stake & mound" corners.
The main problem with Kuechler's 1874 work is that he was measuring with a non-standard vara. His vara was closer to 36 inches than 33-1/3 inches. So, to plot it correctly, you either have to know where the topo features that he called to pass really were (no such maps existed in until 1939, insofar as I'm aware), or you have to recognize from a slew of accounts of resurveys filed in the GLO that later surveyors were consistently reporting finding Kuechlers nominal 1900-vara miles long by about 180 varas on average.
