These always get me in trouble..

paden cash, post: 379421, member: 20 wrote: Now I have to decide to either honor a 25 year old survey that everybody seems ok with...or do some real surveying and figure out someone fifty years ago got all the fences to fit with a few tenths...It would be sooo easy to throw some lath up and walk away...but my conscience won't let me. These always get me in trouble...

The word "honor" should be erased from the ACSM dictionary of surveying and mapping terms. What it invariably means is accepting some questionable judgment because the surveyor who made is just one heckuva good old boy. The banker's axiom is "your first loss is your least loss", which in this situation means just papering over the cracks in the plaster won't fix the foundation.

The kicker is, sometimes awful surveyors get it right, and sometimes good surveyors get it wrong. Be a lot easier if the bad ones were always wrong and the good ones were always right.

You say that everyone seems to be OK with the old survey. But if the even older fences are still standing and no new ones built on the lines marked by the survey, wouldn't that mean that everyone is OK with the old fences, regardless of what the old survey indicates. If so, this seems like a good opportunity for you to look like a survey hero by finding and correcting the mistake, and restoring spatial harmony to the occupation and the survey lines.

Any surveyor can find circumstances where the mathematically correct boundaries miss the long established occupation. It takes a really lucky surveyor to stumble across the circumstances where he finds himself delivering the news to landowners that they don't need to move all their fences or do Lot Line Adjustments to make their legal boundaries fit the occupation after all. Just think of all the trouble that result is going to save for your client and the adjoiners.

Geez, Paden. With your OP, your sounding a bit like the guy who says "I would never want to win the Powerball. Just think of all the taxes I'd have to pay."

Kent McMillan, post: 379423, member: 3 wrote: The word "honor" should be erased from the ACSM dictionary of surveying and mapping terms....

I agree. Accept is a better term.

An 80 acre tract was originally divided into 3 odd shaped tracts. The 25 year old survey is but one of those tracts. That tract has since been divided into 2 irregular tracts. The surveyor whose drawing I have was far from a "good old boy". He was just one out of twenty Oklahoma surveyors that actually did survey work.

And my biggest hurdle is even though there is 'positional evidence' that everything could actually be in a different place; there is no survey evidence. It would almost take a magic wand to come up with enough "independent and corroborating" evidence required of us nowadays to monument a GLO corner where a so-called perpetuated corner already is in place. All that really exists right now is Paden's "hunch".

Whatever I try and figger out...it will take far more time than I was willing to throw at this mess. Besides, it's my nap time.

Well Unc, after conversing with you since the inception of this wonderland for surveyors, I know you knew what you have to do before you wrote the post. 😎

paden cash, post: 379438, member: 20 wrote: And my biggest hurdle is even though there is 'positional evidence' that everything could actually be in a different place; there is no survey evidence.

Okay, so if the plot is going to be Something gets into a squabble with Nothing, Something nearly invariably wins. Or is the story here that all the GLO corners fall out in county road rights-of-way and none has been recovered since the first episode of "The Rockford Files"? If it were me (which I'm sure we'll all agree is a good thing that it isn't), the first thing I'd want to do is see if the surveyor's files still exist and have a look at what else they reveal that maybe didn't get committed to the map.

Kent McMillan, post: 379444, member: 3 wrote: ...If it were me (which I'm sure we'll all agree is a good thing that it isn't), the first thing I'd want to do is see if the surveyor's files still exist and have a look at what else they reveal that maybe didn't get committed to the map.

If one were oriented to a proper regime of chronological research, what you described would be a primary step. This surveyor's son is also a surveyor and I emailed him yesterday concerning his father's notes. I've been down this road before with him and it's a crap shoot as to whether there exists any additional fodder. We'll see.

One of the more irritatingly illogical acts a surveyor in Oklahoma has to perform is an acquiescence to a rusty and bent piece of rebar that occupies a space near the center of an intersection at some noted depth.

We have notes from 1870 that Teddy Barrett's boys set a marked stone somewhere near there. After 50 years the dustbowl hit and around the middle thirties the county graded out the roads. IF we're lucky, there may be some old County Surveyor notes from those years that MIGHT shed some light on it. But I doubt it. The only thing we can actually ascertain from that old bent rebar is that all the other surveyors have used it since someone started keeping notes. Other than that..it is just a huge leap of faith the pin is a perpetuation of the original corner's position. One of the joys of surveying in PLSSia.

And of course you have other monuments usually 40 chains in all the cardinal directions from a pin with which you can gauge position. Much like you and an 800 vara course being plus or minus some distance; we too get a "feel" for whether something seems to fit or not.

This would not be the first time I have walked away from a survey after recovering a previous surveyor's corners...set right where he said he set them. But the whole while wondering in the back of my mind if it was truly where it was stated as being. When the entire PLSS grid has been obliterated, one has to find reasonable positions at times when there is simply nothing else there.

paden cash, post: 379449, member: 20 wrote: And of course you have other monuments usually 40 chains in all the cardinal directions from a pin with which you can gauge position. Much like you and an 800 vara course being plus or minus some distance; we too get a "feel" for whether something seems to fit or not.

When the entire PLSS grid has been obliterated, one has to find reasonable positions at times when there is simply nothing else there.

So, reading between the lines, the situation is that there is a P-K nail or maybe even a good, solid 60d nail or RR spike that has been driven into the county road pavement that is what is presently recognized as marking a particular PLSS corner, but you have a pattern of old fences that appear to predate the time when you believe that the original government monument was destroyed in the course of road construction. You are of the opinion that the early pattern of fences that is consistent with the record of the government subdivision does more likely perpetuate the original position of various PLSSS corners than the late-arriving nails and spikes in the road pavement. What a concept!

As a point of interest, has there been a systematic effort to attempt to locate the original PLSS monuments that fall in the county roads that has provided definite evidence that nothing remains in place? I realize this isn't Texas (in so many different ways), but when the county roads were graded, didn't that consist of grading the bar/borrow/side-drainage ditches to get fill material build up the road bed, rather then cut it down?

Anything that agrees with the GLO notes is WRONG..........a blatant attempt to make reality match the fiction written 150 years or so previous.

You mileage may vary.

What we normally encounter differs significantly from record. So much so that when things match we start to wonder....WHY?

Paden's case is one of those fun circumstances where long standing adherence to some monument tends to overwhelm the tendencies that normally cry out for conformance to the Notes. As most of us have learned through the decades, setting something where the record says it was set originally, per proration, will ensure we didn't put it back where it really was in the first place.

Many county roads were actually laid out by and maintained by township officials with little if any concept of surveying and the importance of perpetuation of monumentation. Hence, any of a thousand different things may or may not have happened in those dark, distant days for which we have no human survivors. Fill may have been added. Cuts may have been made. Nothing was ever done to raise or lower the road bed, it simply has existed as it is since Day One. Some actually took care to lower stones to protect them. Others probably drug them out of the way. In many cases the monument was a wooden stake of fairly hard wood that would last a fair amount of time but not necessarily as long as it has now been since it was put there. Early arrivers may have moved what they recognized as survey monuments, while no one was around to know any better. Some early roads may have been laid out to miss certain critical items, thus diverting them off the true section line, but not so much that it was easy to notice in the days prior to aerial photos.

Kent McMillan, post: 379451, member: 3 wrote: ...As a point of interest, has there been a systematic effort to attempt to locate the original PLSS monuments that fall in the county roads that has provided definite evidence that nothing remains in place? I realize this isn't Texas (in so many different ways), but when the county roads were graded, didn't that consist of grading the bar/borrow/side-drainage ditches to get fill material build up the road bed, rather then cut it down?

There are plenty of places in Oklahoma where the original stone is nestled safe and sound below grade. This isn't really unique to J. Penry's Nebraska digs. We have collectively identified a lot of those areas and when time and money allow, the corners are excavated and identified. I wish we all would spend more time in attempting to determine these locations. The best evidence is the old County Surveyor notes where the stone was reported as buried due to road construction.

In the case of the area I'm working in that is probably not the case. The road is somewhat (3-6 feet) lower than the original grade, which may or may not be where it was 125 years ago. And although the original roadbed may have included borrow to built a crown, the entire road has most certainly eroded over the years and left itself a good distance below the original grade. And the retrievable county notes indicate the corners in the area were "referenced" from fence posts or trees, but never buried.

I have hired a back-hoe several times in my career to look for a corner. I'm going to guess out of a dozen times, I found two. And one of those was a noticeably different size than described in the notes, probably a County Surveyor reset.

Sadly, this is in an area the original survey corners have pretty much been obliterated.

paden cash, post: 379456, member: 20 wrote: Sadly, this is in an area the original survey corners have pretty much been obliterated.

Well, then, the obvious question would be what basis there might be for disproving the locations made from the 60d nail in question. There are several different categories into which solutions to surveyng problems fall:

- those that are definitely, obviously correct and against which no evidence exists that would reasonably show otherwise,
- those that are supported by the major weight of the evidence that as a matter of judgment is considered to outweigh and override any bits of evidence to the contrary,
- those that are made in the knowledge that contrary positions are supported by other evidence, but that seems less compelling,
- those that are supported by a good story and a hunch that seems convincing, but might fall flat in the face of other evidence yet to be uncovered (which usually happens),
- those that are made at 1:00 AM when a final product is to be delivered at 8:00 AM the next day.

Which is this case likely to be?

paden cash, post: 379421, member: 20 wrote: or do some real surveyin

There are three old replacement surveyors, 4 RTK 4 YEAR BS/geomagitions, two REALtors...a tax assessor...the tax collector's BIL...5 Esquires and one YOUR HONOR.....
ALL standing ready to MAKE MONEY...what EVER a simple SURVEYOR'S opinion...
DDSM