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Great task of surveying America began in
Ohio Monday, February 3, 2003
By GARY BROWN Repository Living section
editor
East Liverpool is the �Point of Beginning.�
�On the road above the Bell Company�s dock, Pennsylvania Route 68
invisibly changes to Ohio Route 38, and trees half hide some signs
by the roadside. The place could hardly be more anonymous,� writes
Andro Linklater in his book, �Measuring America: How an Untamed
Wilderness Shaped the United States and Fulfilled the Promise of
Democracy.�
�The language of the signs is equally undemonstrative,� writes
Linklater in the introduction of his book, which was published in
November by Walker & Co. of New York. �A stone marker carries a
plaque headed �The Point of Beginning� that reads, �1112 feet south
of this spot was the point of beginning for surveying the public
lands of the United States. There on September 30, 1785, Thomas
Hutchins, first Geographer of the United States, began the
Geographer�s Line of the Seven Ranges.�
The subject of the English historian�s story is mundane �
surveying. Yet the story itself is both informative and fascinating,
filled with statesmen, scholars, patriots and pioneers. And the
result of the measuring that began in East Liverpool, in Linklater�s
words, produced �a structure of landownership unique in history,
provided the invisible web that supported the legend of the frontier
with its covered wagons and cowboys, its farmers and gold miners,
and permeated the unconscious mind of every American who ever owned
a square yard of soil.�
The �hero� of the story, says Linklater, is Thomas Jefferson, the
founding father who invented the decimal system that could have made
the United States the first metric country in the world, except it
never was adopted by Jefferson�s contemporaries in government.
Jefferson�s vision for the squared-off parceling and democratic
dispersal of frontier property left the familiar patchwork pattern
to the area of the United States that emerged west of the Ohio
River.
�He devised the squares, he had the idea that if everyone had an
opportunity to acquire land � if necessary, just by squatting on it
� a new, independent-minded society would emerge. Up to then, every
society in history had distributed land on a vertical basis � the
most powerful had most, the weakest least or none at all.�
At first, the selling of the land was merely a way to pay war
debts that the United States had piled up during the Revolutionary
War, Linklater said. But, before the land could be sold � �to
settlers, speculators, squatters, gold-miners and cowboys, railroad
barons and homesteaders� � it had to be measured.
�As the settlers moved west into the wilderness, so did the U.S.
government�s surveyors,� said Linklater. �Across the unmapped land
they drew a grid of squares that determined the configuration of
states and of counties. ... But, they did something more. They
transformed the wilderness into something that could be owned.�
Squares were measured with a 22-yard, 100-link surveying chain
devised by Edmund Gunter in England in 1607, instead of by the
decimal system that Jefferson attempted to introduce in the United
States.
�Why 22 yards? Because it made it easy to measure acres,�
Linklater explained. �The entire U.S. land survey was measured in
chains. A homestead measured 160 acres, or in survey terms a square
40 chains long by 40 across.�
Ohio, situated adjacent to the Ohio River, was the first of the
frontier territory to be measured, Linklater noted. The state served
as a �surveying laboratory,� the author maintains.
�Although the federal lands were surveyed in squares, the
territory of Ohio was distributed in no fewer than 19 different
grants ... each owner could use its own measuring methods to divide
up its grant,� explained Linklater, who wrote that the state began
to resemble a �jigsaw puzzle.� �One parcel ended up as a polygon,
with 118 sides, while another, supposed to contain only 458 acres,
was discovered to measure 1,662 acres. Both then and now, the huge
majority of land disputes in Ohio have concerned these irregularly
shaped parcels.�
Those in charge of surveying the rest of the country would not be
so haphazard about their job, the author noted. One surveyor, Jared
Mansfield, imposed a �regularity� on both himself and the United
States that Linklater called �ruthless.�
�The best way to appreciate what Mansfield did is to drive west
from Dayton, Ohio, on Interstate 70 and just across the Indiana
state border to swing north on State Route 277,� explained
Linklater. �Exactly one mile to the east, Indiana�s border with Ohio
runs parallel to it, a north-south line that Jared Mansfield
designated as the First Principal Meridian. West of that line he was
to establish a survey whose squares were so immaculate that their
pattern would be compared to graph paper, checkerboards, and plaid.
�In other words, Ohio, with its different and indifferent
surveys, was the proving ground for the system, but 277 marks the
first line inside Mansfield�s monumental gridiron.�
You can reach Repository Living section editor Gary Brown at
(330) 580-8303 or e-mail:
[EMAIL PROTECTED]
Memorable measurements
Railway companies took advantage of the grid system by which the
western territories of the United States were surveyed, and of the
chain used to measure them.
Railroads designed a standard town that could be laid out and
sold wherever they decided to site a passenger or freight depot.
The basic model consisted of three 160-acre sections on each side
of the track, each section being split four ways into 40-acre �
20-by-20 chains � lots that a surveyor could measure with his eyes
closed.
Seven dollars was as much as the railroad was prepared to pay to
have a town planned. This was known as the seven-dollar plan.
The names of these instant settlements, a land agent working for
the Burlington railway company write �should be short and easily
pronounced.�
�Frederic I think is a very good name,� the land agent wrote. �It
is now literally a cornfield, so I cannot have it surveyed, but
yesterday a man came to arrange to put a hotel there.�
� Source: �Measuring America� by Andro Linklater
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