In a thread that Dave Karoly began below, there was some discussion of whether some gross irregularity in a section could have been the result of the section having been partially located by traversing a convenient route to avoid rough topography and a computational error made in calculating the coordinates of traverse points and making stubbed ties using the incorrect coordinates. This is a somewhat common situation in many early surveys made in West Texas. The following is one example.
In October, 1881, Pecos County Deputy Surveyor L.W. Durrell ran what he called a "connecting line", a traverse between two springs in what is now Terrell County, Texas. Each spring had been used as an initial point, either directly or indirectly, for various surveys that had been made around it, beyond which lay an expanse of unappropriated public domain along the proposed route of a railroad.
Mr. Durrell's traverse mostly followed a military road between the two springs for the sake of convenience of travel. That road was most likely nothing much more than a wagon road formed by pulling a drag to knock down the brush and cutting down the banks of washes and arroyos at crossings. It was built very quickly.
Having run his traverse (the first roughly 12 miles of his traverse ran through such a block of senior surveys which tied to a spring and, aside from a few corners actually made on the ground, were mostly protracted on paper), Mr. Durrell then was able to plot up the theoretical locations of the various blocks of surveys that had been made around the two springs.
He stubbed in a few corners near his traverse and field noted the blocks of many more surveys based upon ties to those few corners.
Here is the situation as State Surveyor James F. Weed found it in 1890 when he retraced Mr. Durrell's connecting line and tried to identify what few footsteps Durrell had left that fixed the positions of the blocks on the ground. The double circle represents what Mr. Weed identifed as an "old corner identified and marked".
BTW, those skinny sections on the East line of T & St. L. R.R. Co. Block No. 149 are the result of Mr. Durrell having made a large error in the first twelve miles of his traverse which led him to think that the senior block to the East was about 1450 varas (roughly 4000 ft.) further East than it actually was.
So the 450 vara sections were what was left after the portions of the surveys in conflict with the senior surveys were excluded. The GLO held off on issuing any patents to the eastern two tiers of surveys running for about 13 miles along the senior blocks until a resurvey could be made to exactly determine the extent of the conflict and correct the surveys to distribute the shortage between them, the two tiers alternating as land surveyed for the owner of the land certificate under which the survey had been made and land surveyed for the State under the terms of the certificate.
Incidentally, another interesting detail in that sketch is how the common corner of Surveys Nos. 1, 2, 11, and 12 in T. & St. L. R.R. Co. Block No. 150 was constructed. The construction shown on the map treats Survey 1 as in effect a senior survey within the block and constructs the common corner from the calls of the field notes of Survey No. 1. This was the practice of the GLO at the time under the iron pen of Ernst von Rosenberg, Chief Draftsman. Naturally, Texas courts later held otherwise.
What's the big deal?
Only 4000 Varas.
The truly funny thing is that when the later owner of the private sections in the blocks Mr. Durrell field noted in conflict with two senior blocks finally wanted to get a patent from the State in connection with a sale twenty years after L.W. Durrell's original locative survey, the Commissioner of the GLO insisted that he had to have a resurvey made so that corrected field notes could be prepared and filed for the two easternmost tiers.
There was a long, drawn out correspondence between Geo. B. Loving Co. of Ft. Worth and Commissioner Charles Rogan. Loving wrote to the Commissioner to say that as agents for Kuhn, Loeb & Company his company had sold T.& St. L. Ry. Co. Blocks 147, 148, 149, and 153 in Pecos County, but had been unable to give satisfactory deeds until the matter of conflicts in the Blocks had been settled.
He asked the Commissioner whether he could arrange "to have this surveying done by a competent man at an early date at Kuhn, Loeb & Company’s expense" and what approximately the expense would be; and he requested a summary of the sections in each block that had not been patented and were not in conflict.
Commissioner Rogan wrote in reply to Loving’s letter of 9/26/1902 that "I can appoint you a competent surveyor to do this work". However, he noted, "at present all of the State Surveyors are engaged and it will be a month or more before I can get a man to do the work".
To cut to the chase, guess who was appointed State Surveyor to perform the resurvey to correct that sloppy survey that L.W. Durrell had made in 1881? L.W. Durrell was the low bidder on that work and got the job. :> His price? $200 in 1902 dollars, which is equivalent to about $5200 in 2012 money. For that fixed fee, he ran roughly sixteen miles of line (probably by short-base triangulation, although he didn't say so explicitly) and actually used a typewriter to prepare multiple corrected versions of his field notes in the course of a lengthy argument by mail with Ernst von Rosenberg, Chief Draftsman of the GLO, as to what the original survey intended.
Yes, you got that right. The GLO were telling the original surveyor, Durrell, what his intentions had been. :>
>
> Yes, you got that right. The GLO were telling the original surveyor, Durrell, what his intentions had been. :>
Ah yes, the GIS'ers were around much earlier than most have thought.
> > The GLO were telling the original surveyor, Durrell, what his intentions had been.
> Ah yes, the GIS'ers were around much earlier than most have thought.
That's actually a fairly apt observation as it applies to multitudes of the surveys that were done primarily on paper in Texas during the boom of the 1870's and 1880's. The exercise was one of trying to figure out where there was some space left on the county map to cover with field notes which the examiners at the GLO plotted up on their county map and either decided looked correct or were in conflict with existing surveys.
Naturally, later when it came time to put those paper surveys on the ground, the immediate question was "What in the heck was Mr. Deputy Surveyor trying to do?". After all, the main element of the plan was how he intended for it to be located (while never actually getting around to locating it himself). What Chief Draftsman von Rosenberg was pointing out to Durrell was that while Durrell had called for a corner of a senior block of surveys to the East, he had no actual knowledge of where it was on the ground, so the call was purely suppositional and should not hold over other more definite elements of his descriptions.
The whole question arose because Durrell reported that the distance to that block corner was a couple of hundred varas excessive over about 13 miles, but he wanted to use the corner of the senior block to fix the corner nonetheless. The GLO said "no", that his calls he made from the actual monuments he had made would control the position of the north line of the blocks that he had field noted.
And the irony was that Durrell's measurements of the 13 or so miles (which he probably mostly made by short-baseline triangulation) were so faulty that he was short a couple of hundred varas in 13 miles. A correct measurement would in fact have put the North line of the block he was resurveying so close to the corner of the senior block he called for, but never visited, that von Rosenberg wouldn't have given him any static about it. Low bid surveying: we'll do it the cheapest way possible, no matter how much it ultimately costs. :>
Darn you and your traverse lines Durrell. Working through a mess in Pecos County right now and there's some serious excess in the Block and double monumentation about 200 feet apart on my subject tract. Ironic that a search of L.W. Durrell brought me back here.
Andy Nold, post: 376987, member: 7 wrote: .... Ironic that a search of L.W. Durrell brought me back here.
I've searched a subject before on the internet..and been directed to the very SurveyorConnect post that led me to the search....:-S
One of my clients married into the Durrell (pronounced "Durl") family and provided some interesting details that you won't find in the written history otherwise, I don't believe. Durrell and his wife lived in Alpine when he was in the ranching business and making occasional surveys, but later moved to San Antonio where he lived in his retirement as an investor. The Durrells had built a house for themselves in Alpine which they duplicated in San Antonio using the identical set of plans.
As we all should know, surveyors' wives are not the ordinary class of people and Mrs. Durrell was no exception. She had a thing about floors because the floors were mopped every day and then newspapers were spread out to cover the floors to walk on.
The measurement of distances by short baseline triangulation is something that Durrell didn't bother to mention in his report to the Commissioner of the GLO upon the resurvey work he had done, emphasizing instead the great effort that measuring the thirteen miles in inclement weather had taken, but he did mention triangulation on the next resurvey assignment he received from the Commissioner and that was the clue that explained why there were pairs of rock mounds about 50 varas (if I recall) apart on the brows of hills, one on line and one offset at right angles to it, built in a way that looked as it they had been supporting a flag.
