SURVEYING YOUR OWN LAND

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Metes and bounds is the most common surveying method and the one used almost exclusively in the East. Metes and bounds defines property by its boundary lines, each line consisting of direction (or bearing) and distance (or length). Here is an example:

Beginning at a point 247 feet due east of Henly Fork, thence N47W, 210 feet, thence N43E, 204 feet to an Oak, thence S47E, 210 feet to a post, thence S43W, 204 feet to the point of beginning. Containing 0.98 acres, more or less.

Notice that each leg consists of both direction and distance. With a compass and a tape measure, you could walk around the perimeter.

The public land survey system evolved in response to helter-skelter settlement in colonial times. In the 1700s, nobody knew how much land anyone owned, or where it was. In northern Georgia, for instance, entrepreneurs sold over 29 million acres in a three-county area that contained only 9 million!

Thomas Jefferson solved the problem. During his presidency, the federal government sent a small army of surveyors across the Appalachians with instructions to split the frontier into squares, placing boundary markers every mile. Thus, the public land survey system consists of a checkerboard of square-mile lots, called sections . Each one of these sections contains 640 acres and a boundary marker at each corner.

To encourage people to fill up the sections, the government created homestead allotments. The basic allotment was 160 acres — a quarter section. The surveyors marked these boundaries, too, and called them quartercorners.

Now, all this won't help you unless you know how to read a public land description (Fig. 1). It sounds hard until you get the hang of it. Each quarter of a section bears the name of its compass location: NE, NW, SE, SW-e.g., "the SW 1/4 of section 3." Want less than 160 acres? Chop the SW 1/4 into quarters again. Each quarter-quarter is 40 acres. One of them could be named the NE 1/4 of the SW 1/4 (shaded in Fig. 1). And so on down. (On occasion, adjacent quarters will be combined to yield a "half," e.g., "the south 1/2 of section 27.")

Thus, a public land description will not list boundary lines. Jefferson designed the system so that all boundary lines run north-south and east-west — along the quarters as well as the sections. Since section boundaries are exactly one mile long, subunit borders will be exact fractions of a mile.

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