Photos of early 1900s bench marks (test post)
(this is a test post on beer leg. I posted this same info on the new RPLS and was curious at how the two sites handled photo-intensive posts… the ease of creating the posts at either site, editing the posts, sizing photos, quality and legibility of the photos once posted, etc. Lets see what happens...)
Photos of early 1900s bench marks
In the last couple years I’ve stumbled across a couple of examples of early 1900s benchmarks that the members of this board might find interesting.
First, instructions on how to make a bench mark on a tree from the 1898 “A Textbook on Surveying and Mapping” by the International Correspondence School:
The first example I ran across of this style of bench was set in a 1908 bench run from Fort Klamath (130 miles south of Bend, just a little south of Crater Lake) to Prineville (32 miles east of Bend). While searching for traces of the 1853 Elliott Wagon Trail (which later became the 1867 Huntington wagon road), my friend John Frye found this stump:
28” Ponderosa Pine stump:
Close-up of tag and nail :
Close-up of tag – “4450” is stamped next to the word “feet” and on the bottom right-hand corner the number “182” is partially obscured by the tack head.
John wrote to the USGS and they informed him that this bench, BM 182, was set in a 1908 level run from Fort Klamath, Oregon to Prineville, Oregon. They also sent scanned images of the computation book pages for portion of the run in our vicinity.
Cover of 1908 field computation book A7829:
Sketch from 1908 field computation book A7829 (this work also included a level run around Crater Lake)
Page 35 has the information for BM 182, which is more of a temporary bench mark. The next bench after 182 is “F 2” which was (it appears to be gone now) a brass disk. It appears that permanent disks were set every 5 miles and named A 2, B2, #2, et cetera. Some of these are still in existence today and have NGS data sheets . Approximately every mile these TMBs like BM 182 were set in trees and numbered consecutively … 180, 181, 182…
(of interest to Oregon surveyors is the red inked note at the top of the page that reads:
“descriptions corrected by McArthur Aug 21 1926”. This is Lewis A. McArthur, the original author of the book “Oregon Geographic Names” )
John and I went hunting for BM 199 which is in the desert east of town. The information for 199 is found on page 38 of the computation book and it was supposedly about a mile west of bench “M 2”, which we knew existed:
The 36” diameter Juniper had been cut down by wood cutters many decades ago, but fortunately they high-stumped the tree, leaving a very unique bench mark for us to find:
The tree was actually a twin juniper, with a scribed blaze and the tag on one trunk and the actual bench at the base of the other trunk:
A triangle was blazed into the tree and the elevation 3276 was scribed into the blaze. The “3” is now overgrown, although a portion of it is still partially visable.
Tag detail – “3276” stamped next to “feet” and “199” stamped in lower right-hand corner
Bench detail on other stump:
The following bench is along a canal and I believe it was set circa 1905 by the irrigation company surveyors. The “BM” scribe is legible, but not the elevation.
Text book "bench mark is... cut in the form af a pyramid
In these parts, this type of bench was being made for the next couple decades. We found this bench set during the construction of the 1927 Cloverdale Market Road. The level notes give a station/offset (no doubt paced), which might be helpful to get an approximate location on the road to begin searching for P.I. monumentation
Look good to me, thanks for sharing.
Doug
I certainly like the way these came through here.
Mike,
When I view the notes on RPLS, I can right-click the image, zoom in and read the text.
When I right-click the images of the notes here, I can’t zoom. If I save the image to my computer and view it stand-alone, I can zoom in but the text pixelates by the time it gets big enough to read.
I assume that’s because Wendell is resizing the photos hosted on his site to save bandwidth. If you wanted the text to be readable, I think you would have to host the photo elsewhere and link to it here.
Thanks for posting. Interesting stuff.
Great post Mike!
Rich - thanks. I kind of suspected that'd be the case when I posted them. On RPLS you post them in real time (by which I mean the photo is visible in your post once you upload it, as opposed to the Beer Leg post where it inserts image code in the post and you can't see the photo till you hit the preview button). Then (on RPLS) you can right-click the photo in your post, lock the perspective, and then resize it to, say, 600 pixel width. You can also click on the photo and drag the corner "grips" to re-size although I don't think the perspective stays locked with this method.
The original photos I posted ranged in size from 100K to almost a meg. On the old RPLS I used to play around with sizing them correctly before uploading them. This RPLS is a lot cooler, just upload them as-is and then visually re-size them. Same with Beer Leg, to an extent. At least you don't have to dickie-bird around on your computer resizing photos.
The Beer Leg method is still easier than olden times, but it just resizes them as they are uploaded and that’s what you get. No biggie – I’ll know to make a zoomed, blown up image of small, critical detail images next time.
All in all, both sites work well. My photo bucket account is going to become a ghost town now.
Thanks for sharing, it was a good read.
I suppose it would be poor form to host your photos on RPLS.com, then link to them here. 😀
Rich-
Actually, that's what I originally did since I did my first post on RPLS. But the links to the photos in this case made the post too large... 5900 characters and only >5000 characters are allowed here on beer leg.
Uploading them on beer Leg made a smaller html address for each photo which made all the difference. E.g. - the last photo of my post @ rpls.com = _http:/static.smallworldlabs.com /bnp/user_content/photos/000/000/143/ 17d8ed8a7628ad8df8f51df846ba3380-original-13-1927-bm.jpg
Whereas when I upload it here and link to it the address =
_http:/beerleg.com/https://surveyorconnect.com/images/uploaded/ 201007040754344c303e3ac7a21.jpg
Shouldn't make a difference with regular sized posts, but still it probably isn't the neighborly thing to do either
Another difference in posting at the two sites
Also, it a bonus at rpls that within 24 hours you can edit a post. In both posts I had one sentence that was supposed to read:
"5 miles and named A 2, B2, C2, et cetera"
But I fat fingered the C as # and the sentence read:
"5 miles and named A 2, B2, #2, et cetera"
I was able to change it on RPLS, but here I couldn’t. Beer Leg has a short time frame where you can edit, but not a whole 24 hours.
This is advantageous for posts where you’re sharing experiences with the board and want to get it right, but I can see where editing could be troublesome for the majority of posts which usually end up being name-calling donnybrooks. Can you imagine this scenario:
Original Post
Surveyor1 : You father roping son of a sea cook I’m calling you out in the street at high noon.
Surveyor2: Liar. I’ll see you at high noon. Bring your big artillery, bucko, your going to need it.
23 hours and 59 minutes later Surveyor1 edits post, but Surveyor2 doesn’t catch the edit and for time immemorial the post will always read as follows:
Post Edited by Surveyor1
Surveyor1 : You don’t love me as much as I love you & you don’t have the nerve to meet me at the NoTell Motel at lunch to consummate our relationship in a biblical fashion.
Surveyor2: Liar. I’ll see you at high noon. Bring your big artillery, bucko, your going to need it.
This could cause some confusion...
