Today, surveying a smaller acre lot in a location where control is terrible and has only been made worse over the years, I found this. Almost right on the money, and I use that phrase loosely given the area, from calcs to published section corner coords... Metal detected and dug around quite a bit believing it to be a reference marker from an owner protecting their corner but had no luck in finding anything else around. Center checked +/- .60 and .30.... Not great but hard to believe a surveyor would set something like that. Post is .67 in diameter and found a similar one with a 5/8" rebar next to it on the corner to the East. The bar didn't check any better... I might believe it to be a corner if it weren't for just one lot, however finding two is suspicious. May need a second look...
It's hard to tell scale from the picture. How big is it? is it a cut off utility pole? Did you paint it up? (I'm guessing yes)
Old fence post that got cut off and subsequently painted up by the last surveyor to visit?
What do the owners and adjoiners have to say about it? I'd have a hard time just ignoring it...
I did not paint it, and can't stand seeing everything painted like graffiti. I believe it is an old fence post, and it is plumb as they come. It's .67 in diameter and sticks out of the ground about 2 feet.
I would look beneath the post.
Years ago surveying a lot I had to dig 1.5' to uncover a concrete monument. I set a square wood post over it with 18" exposed as the best way to indicate to future owners to "Look Here, Please."
Paul in PA
It was already painted? How hard did you look around it? Did you probe for a non-ferrous monument with the shovel or just scan with the metal detector? I suppose that could be the corner.
I think it is indicative to go looking for it's history. Asking questions in the neighborhood. Somebody probably knoweth. Also, the possible person who placed those, probably placed them INSIDE their property, ie, caddy-corner to the fd 5/8" bar. So, I'd start there. If they have a history, they could be significant. If they don't have a history, they could be insignificant. Either way, you will learn a bit about Emma's cat, and her trip to the vet, if you go asking around.... (That is, you inevitably learn extraneous info, that only serves to make you realize the HUMANITY of the people for which you are serving to set up boundaries. This connection to their humanity serves to make you realize that you really should try to keep a solid pedigree for yielded to monuments, or disprove the pedigree, for rejected ones. Capassa?
I've been told by numerous landowners (on more rural properties) "those little pins you surveyors put in the ground are of no use to me, so I replaced them with posts ". If they memorialize the location of now nonexistent original corners...they are original corners.
I had a crew out in some rough, open western Oklahoma wasteland not too long back. We had found a good amount of the exterior boundary, including a couple of precious original stones on a township line, but nobody was looking forward to venturing into the interior. I armed the crew with some hooey coordinates to identify areas to look for corners.
Out in the middle of nowhere, more than a mile from where any fence had ever been, they found a vertical railroad tie set 3' in the ground. Small football sized native stones were piled around the base of the tie up to about knee high. It was 20' from a 'calc' corner, where I had ran two miles using 1875 GLO distances. The original corner was a noted as a "buried quart of charcoal, with pits and mounds dug per instructions", with no trees close enough for any accessory use.
I was happy to find something and told the PC to set us a control point close by and locate the tie. He questioned my judgment, mainly because there was no iron pin anywhere near. I explained most of the corners in that entire township were originally set with long gone posts or pits and mounds. He was still unconvinced. I guess he just didn't smell any evidence of a previous 'surveyor'....maybe rotted flagging would have changed his mind...I don't know. He was all too happy to voice his descending vote about the railroad tie. I use to ask him "why else would someone go to all that trouble?". I think he thought it more of a goat stake than a corner.
We completed the 2500 acre survey and that corner fit all too well with everything else we found out there. I called it the corner, set some WC pins in the area and filed a corner record. The PC at the time eventually obtained his license and has moved on, but we still talk occasionally. I finally got him to admit it was probably a perpetuated corner, but I always start our conversation with "found any railroad ties lately?". He always grins and tells me "shut up.....". 😉
It's interesting how often items are dismissed as "goat stakes" when there is no corroborating evidence, such as, perhaps goats?
W. S. Spray, RLS#169 made use of Creosote Poles and Bridge timbers...
ftp://gis.arkansas.gov/SLS_CORNERS/Grant/2706S12W16000403.pdf
Creosote Block flush with ground...
ftp://gis.arkansas.gov/SLS_CORNERS/Grant/2705S12W01000979.pdf
Creosote Block w/ alum. numerals & letters...
ftp://gis.arkansas.gov/SLS_CORNERS/Ouachita/5213S17W11004268.pdf
8" x 12" x 30" creosote block w/ aluminum numbers...
DDSM:beer:
James Fleming, post: 344209, member: 136 wrote: I've been told by numerous landowners (on more rural properties) "those little pins you surveyors put in the ground are of no use to me, so I replaced them with posts ". If they memorialize the location of now nonexistent original corners...they are original corners.
Ditto. See and hear that quite frequently around here, especially out in farm country. Many landowners want a Bound style monument that sticks out of the ground 3-4 feet.
Two days ago a very significant fire took out a corner post completely. Found laying on the ground was a 2-foot piece of rebar. Once upon a time that rebar was placed dead center in the top of that corner post to confirm that the hundred year-old corner post was the center of section monument. The bar is now vertical once again in the center of the smoldering remnant of post below ground. New corner posts will be placed at a safe distance from the bar.
Surprised nobody has mentioned this...EVERYBODY knows that property corners are virtual magnets for utility companies.
It's just some sort of voodoo magic.
.6' x .3' for a section corner? Sounds dang good to me. Does it reasonably fit the topography calls?
Around here...during the early 1900's, utility poles were set directly inline with the fences, so they could double as a fence post and not be in the way. A pole at a fence corner was even better.
It is not uncommon to see round fence posts every couple hundred feet along a fence line, where an old phone line was abandoned.
From the photo, it looks to be a treated telephone pole. I'd be looking for evidence of long gone fence lines in this area. The posts may have rotted, burned, or been salvaged. It was very common in the old days to salvage the wire and re-use it on a different fence. The only thing left may be post hole depressions, small mounds of rocks, and a trail of buried nails. A metal detector could find the trail of nails. Any large trees may still have nails buried under the bark.
Holy Cow, post: 344230, member: 50 wrote: Two days ago a very significant fire took out a corner post completely.
I saw the fires on the news and wondered how close they were to your side of the pasture.
Once, many years ago, young Paden learned a lesson about wildfires...
We were gridding off (for cross sections) a 5 acre irregular shaped swatch o' ground that was bounded by section line roads on the north and east, and the AT&SF RR on the west. It was early fall and the whole thing was covered with dead and dried six foot tall black-eyed susan and pig-weed. The damned dried flowers and such were tearing us apart and getting under my t-shirt and down my Levis..something HAD to be done.
In my infinite wisdom I decided to clandestinely burn the dead growth. Although probably a really foolish idea, I justified it in the fact that the trains were always starting fires by the tracks that time of year and the Oak Cliff Volunteer Fire Department was only about 1/4 mile away. Being the time of year the trains always sparked a brushfire, there was plenty of help hanging out polishing their brush pumpers. Understand I'm not saying I think this is a good idea nowadays, but I apparently thought it was a good idea back then....
I made my best "time detonator"....a small white paper sack from the morning's donuts with a bunch of napkins wadded up inside it. Then I placed a lit cigarette inside the top of a book of paper matches and shoved it in the sack. The distance from the lit end of the cigarette to the match heads being the variable "timer". When the cigarette smoldered down to the matches, the whole thing goes up in flames. Right before we left for lunch I lit the bomb and tossed it at the south end of the field.
Sure enough, when we got back from lunch, the best part of the whole area had been burned to the ground. The Oak Cliff boys were winding their hoses back up and the ground was blackened with little whiffs of smoke spattered about. Perfect!......................................................NOT.
Have you ever walked all over 5 acres that just burned? Jeeesussss....we choked and gagged on the thick smoke smell that caught in our throats. My clothes, the truck and the equipment smelled like a grass fire for the rest of the season. I thought I'd never get that smell out of my nose..
One of the guys on the crew asked me as we were driving home, "Got any other bright ideas?"....:pinch:
it's truly a miracle you are still alive..... smh..... 😉
Before I was licensed I had my boss survey off a parcel of land off of my old man's land around an existing house that I was buying from him.
When putting up a fence around the parcel to keep the cattle out my old man, being a farmer promptly pounded the new posts in directly over the property corners. When I realized this I had to shake my head in disbelief, but I can see his point. He was putting the fence directly on the property line.
When talking to rural farmers I often hear of them putting a fence post directly over a corner.
I ran across what I thought was a goat stake earlier this year, more aptly described as a T-Rex stake, 6" dia. section of drill pipe set in and filled with concrete, sticking up a good 5' and painted red. Seemed a bit of an odd place for a bollard at the time. Stumbled through the survey for lack of control but eventually got it all dialed in and wouldn't you know it, that dang bollard was within tenths of the computed corner's position. Dimple that.
Exactly. I have a fit when a crew only ties in the monuments and does not tie in anything else near that location.
It can be trees, poles, stop signs and most any other natural or man made item.
Without something that stands a witness to your location, there is no simple means to prove the location.
Most power poles have a ground rod and I seen dozens of examples of those being mistaken for property corners and the TxDot concrete monuments being confused with being the point of division between neighbors.
