When land was cheap(?)

"
. . . just a thought . . ."

And a good one.
Is it a coincidence that the more value we place on real property, the more evolved our techniques to measure it?
(Did I leave a word out of that sentence?)

I like the way you ramble, BTW.
Why is every bluegrass band in the world is named "The (insert descriptive noun or adjective) Ramblers?"

Don

Maybe it wasn't land that was cheap

But that money was expensive (rare)

But they can make (print) more money - you cant do that with land

I guess that depends on the way you look at it. Land was cheap back then. With fewer people with enough resources to demand the same amount of land, those with the resources were paying less, and the precision necessary to satisfy to land owner was less. But with more people crowding together and demanding more of the same land it does get more expensive, and more precision is necessary to satisfy the land owner.

On the other hand, quantifying resources by comparing it to a continually decreasing value commodity, seems to show the resource as gaining value. When in actuality it is the commodity losing more value than the resource is gaining.

To make a worthwhile comparison, you need to have a basket of goods and services at the two dates and look at all the different ratios among them. Stuff like:
-an acre of average farm land
-a day's unskilled labor
-surveying the boundary of one section of land
-the digging of a water well
-an office visit to a doctor
-a pound of meat for roasting
-a bushel of wheat
-a bushel of corn
-a pound of sugar/honey/molasses (as most available)
-transportation from one state capital to another
-a team of draft horses
-a cooking pot
-a hunting rifle
-send a letter across the country
-a dollar
-an ounce of gold

What you will see is that the ratios among these things are going up and down relative to each other as times and availability of various materials change. How many acres of farm land would it cost to travel a long distance? How many acres to buy a good hunting rifle? How long do you have to work to buy that acre? How long do you have to work to pay for a doctor visit?

Whether something is more expensive depends on which thing you compare it to.

Economists define standard baskets of goods and services to come up with an average for various years, but the choice of how much of what to put in the basket leaves lots of room for different answers.

> Why do surveyors always say things like "land was cheap back then" . . . or something like it, when explaining poorer quality work "back then"?
>
> My dad always told me how much he could buy with a penny . . . a nickel . . . or a dime, back when he was a kid. Wow, it must have really been the "good ole days", to get so much for so little! It's little wonder that I always wished I could take my today money back to that period.
>
> But, he would also tell me that a penny, a nickel or a dime was much harder to come by.
>
> I remember having to fold a dollar twice to fit it in my wallet and I remember store clerks mumbling under their breaths when they had to fit those ^@%$&@#$^&$#% dollars in their drawers.
>
> There's no doubt in my mind that back then a person never expected to carry many dollars with him(or her).
>
> Add to this that American money . . . back then . . . was anything but cheap and it was anything but easy to get.
>
> SO!
>
> Why do surveyors always seem to believe that land . . . back then . . . was so cheap . . . almost(seemingly), to the point of near worthlessness?
>
>
> . . . just a thought . . .

That is a very interesting question. My first reaction is that it wasn't the cost of land that greatly influenced the "precision" of the surveys of yesteryear, though I'm sure it was a factor in some instances. What I think was the major contributor to the lack of precision was the methods of surveying and the surveyors themselves. The cost involved in measuring long distances (a relative term) and actually achieving the tight precisions easily achieved today was higher than most landowners could afford, and the surveyors and landowners actually understood that the lines run and marked on the ground were the actual boundaries, not the precise distances recited in the descriptions.

The purpose of this post is my implication that the general degree of care that surveyors employ today was employed back then . . . given the difference in technology.

The idea that leads to "well . . . land was cheap", back then, is to imply that "because" the land was cheap(?), surveyors took less than due care in measuring the land.

So . . . in this day and age, I think many surveyors might find no, or little need to understand and apply a degree of care that relates to the first person(surveyor), who's footsteps we're charged with following. That is, the "cheapness" of land attitude somewhat leaves us off the hook of actually following the old surveyors and absolutely applying our newest technology with the idea that anything that doesn't fit it(the new technology's results), must be because the old surveyors back in the day "when land was cheap", just . . . evidently . . . didn't really care about doing things accurately . . . and/or more so . . . precisely.

My researching into Ohio's Western Reserve is helping me to understand how a rather high degree of care(by "then", highly qualified surveyors), still resulted in what appears(now), to be a lack of accuracy, a lack of precision and a lack of care.

Certainly, the accuracy is in fact, lacking, but even the precision appears to be lacking, until one actually begins to break down measurements mile by mile and chain by chain . . . looking for ever-changing "patterns", that most definately(honest to @$%$*%$#&** . . . how does one spell "definately?), exist.

I still don't understand why I'm seeing some of what I see, but this project is most enlightening.

One of my first assignments when working for ITT Community Development Corporation during the inception of what is now known as Palm Coast was to read all the abstracts of all lands to be acquired, or already acquired.

A portion of this land was oceanfront and about two miles long bordered on the east by the Atlantic and on the West by the Intracostal Waterway. It was roughly 800 acres. In 1913 the whole shebang sold for $128 or $0.16/acre. The reason being it was too salty for farming and too thick with palmetto for livestock so basically worthless. Today is a whole different story. It’s a boater’s haven for millionaires and probably a lottery winner or two.

As for your question, when retracing the above parcel it was absolutely amazing how close all the corners fit. The original surveyor was D.D. Moody or his father. Probably 85% of them were accepted. We used T-2’s with Distomats for all of the boundary work performed on the entire project (110,000 acres).

Y’all have a great week! B-)

Land has never been cheap, and that argument is made only by those who don't know what they are talking about.

Original surveys are as accurate as they will ever be, and today's surveyors can rarely achieve the same accuracy when retracing them.

Precision of measurements can be much better, even by laymen, with today's technology. Therein lies the problem.

Paraphrase from something I saw on the net:

When I was young my Mom would send me to the store with a dollar and I'd come home with two loafs of bread, half a pound of cheese, a dozen eggs, a pound of hamburger, coffee, sugar, a box of tea.

You can't do that anymore.

Too many surveillance cameras.

Don