Why does this corner look like a shotgun?

Not just laying around, but we just finished a job where one of the corners is a gun barrel.

The southeast corner of my father's land is a gun barrel that was set in 1947.

Rebar, smooth rods and pipe became hard to find and very expensive around here in the late 1970s and early 1980s. A local surveyor bought a truck load of new un bored gun barrells at an auction and set them for many years. They were about 1.7ft long.

😉

I found a pistol in a catch basin a few years ago. If you can believe the movies and television, that doesn't just happen. Who knows what the story is.

I also found a gun barrel at a corner once on some old farm land. I spent an embarrassing length of time trying to decide what to do to get it out of my way so I could look for the pipe or rod - and finally realized what was going on. The owner wanted me to extract it because he was convinced that his grandfather had placed it there. I declined, but I took several photos for him. I'd like to think he left it in place, but...

Never found a gun while surveying. I have found a backpack with a brick of green stuff and a beam scale, hypodermic needles, bags of what I imagined to be dog poop, several pot and crack pipes, crystal chandler parts (?), watches, a silver spoon, a stash of mason jars and other unmentionables. But never a gun. I wouldn't touch it if I did though, that is what my cell phone is for.

Doing topo in Wake Forest NC years ago. Opened a catch basin and in it was a pump shotgun. Still loaded! Called the police. They said several years ago there was a Hardees robbery with a shotgun near there.

One time only. Dug up an extremely rusty and crumbling revolver while excavating at a street intersection for a possible bar. Absolute piece(s) of junk. Have no idea how long it must have been in the ground beneath that city street.

There is an interior corner east of here that has been monumented with an octagonal rifle barrel for probably 100 years, along with ancient fences and occupation. In a standard world it would be considered a center of section. But the section was subdivided into 40 acre allotments using the "three mile method"...I guess I'll call it the NE corner of the NE/4 of the SW/4.

The highway boys came in a few years ago and set a center of section with a brg-brg intersect. The gun barrel and their pin are almost thirty feet apart. Litigation between adjacent owners ensued. An associate in my office was called upon to provide expert testimony, as were four other "private" surveyors.

Among the parol testimony was that of the 80 year old son of the original Citizen Potawatomi alottee. He remembered the gun barrel as the "corner" from his childhood in the 1930s. Slam dunk, right?

Wrong.

The court ruled the highway department's new corner was "mo better" because they were a government agency, I guess. Procedures for retracement by the BLM Manual were not allowed as evidence mainly because the judge felt the land had been patented (it was originally surplus allotments) and not held in trust. It was a sad and painfully embarrassing miscarriage of court ruling. I've never seen a more arrogant and unintelligent jack-ass than that judge. Nobody (as yet) has appealed.

We call it the "gun barrel case" around the office. Nobody talks much about it... :-/

I found an old .22 barrel along the railroad tracks at a job a few years ago. Looked like it had been there for years, rusted and pitted something awful.

Gun barrel corner means, agreed upon corner, in ancient boundary lore.

Three times I have found firearms or what was left of them.

First was an octagon gun barrel marking a quarter section corner set by someone after the GLO guys. I uncovered the top six inches, flagged it and "shot" it!

Second was when the magnetic locator started screaming near a property corner downhill and in the woods on a mobile home lot on the edge of a small nearby town. I dug up a revolver, shotgun, and a .22 rifle wrapped up in a blanket and stuffed in a garbage bag buried in the ground. We were surveying for the bank as they had foreclosed on the mobile home. We called the county sheriff and found out that the previous owner's grandson was a dopehead and was stealing all of his grandfather's things and turning them into cash. His grandfather buried the guns in his back yard to hide them, but passed away before he could retrieve them. They were returned to his family, but they were badly rusted after having been there for several years.

Third time was when I was doing bridge inspection work for a county engineering job. The bottom of the creek had about six inches of water in it, and I noticed the outline of a a lever action rifle lying on the bottom of the creek. I picked it up to discover that the wood forearm and stock had rotted away, and all that was left was the metal. I was going just hang it on the wall at my barn, but when I told a co-worker about it, he told his dad who was a detective with the county sheriff's department. They came and got what was left of the rifle and got information on where it was found. They were able to get the serial number off it and traced it back to the owner and an unsolved robbery.

Oh, the things we find! I am still looking for a wad of Franklins that somebody did not want anymore and threw away. No such luck!:-D

Did you lose a roll of hundred dollar bills

wrapped in a rubber band???

I found the rubber band.

No, it was paper sack full of $20s.:whistle:

About three years ago I found a Benelli Super Black Eagle in a culvert in the middle of a 100+ acre sugar cane field. I thought about keeping it but I decided to call the local sheriff office to pick it up. It was still in good shape. Looked like it wasn't there more that a week or so.

Harold

Not me, but a cousin did. He was a crew chief for a City survey crew that was surveying for storm drain upgrades. He climbed down into a box culvert and found a bank bag with several thousand dollars in cash. He turned it into the police and it was traced back to a drug bust the week before.

Andy

Not a gun but yesterday I stopped at a boat landing on the way back into the office. I know the ice has been off the lake for just over a week and was surprised to see a knife in about 6" water at the concrete boat landing ramp. Very easy to see so I would say that I was the first person at this boat ramp since the ice went out. Turns out to be a very nice Winchester "limited edition" single, fold open with about a 3 1/2" blade. I stopped there to feel the water temperature as its my favorite canoeing practice lake. Still a bit cold for me...

No guns yet, but an old PC I worked for right out of college told me a story about doing some lot and block corner finding in a subdivision in Orlando, Fl.

They were finding a lot of them as the subdivision was pretty new. They started digging for a 4x4 concrete mon at the boundary and hit a trash bag. What looked like a small baby's head was visible. The crew started throwing up and called the police. It turned out that some kid (think Damien from "The Omen") in the neighborhood had buried a bunch of his little sister's dolls all over the place. There were bits of metal in some of the bags and they found a few more in the area. He said that initial sight of the shovel hitting a skull haunted him for a while.