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Voices of Spencer Creek
Norm's Notebook: The Mystery Corner of Section 37
"Subdivision plats often indicate how errors are to be distributed... If all lots are diminished, differences are distributed proportionately..." from Applied Field Surveying by King Royer
By Norm Maxwell
Posted on Feb 25, 2005 |
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Where I work, there is occasion to deal with century old land surveys out in the woods to determine true property line in preparation to cutting timber. It is incumbent upon the party cutting the timber to know exactly where the property line is and which trees are on what side of the invisible lines running through the woods. If the cutting party blows it, it gets to pay the owner of the stolen timber double its value--triple if it was deliberate.
I had served on the Cadastral survey crew here in Eugene 20 years ago before becoming a permanent employee and moving on to other things. I never progressed beyond brush cutter/point setter but still, I learned a lot about original surveys.
An original corner stone set 130 years ago with a Barts Solar Transit on a cloudy day with a stretched out distance chain dragged along the ground through the brush still has precedence over a new brass cap proportioned in with a state of the art Swiss theodolite that can split one degree into 60 "minutes" and each minute into 60 "seconds" and measures miles of distance to the millimeter with laser range finding.
The agency where I work has received direction from above to start cutting timber in a big way. A proposed sale not too far from town abuts a giant timber company's holdings with a common line that looks sort of like a side view of a staircase. Our managers have decided that we don't need to survey timber sales any more in an effort to save time and money. Oscar, our lone Cadasatral surveyor feels ostracized and counts the days until he can retire. You can make a case for not surveying a timbersale line if it is straight and runs between two well established and perpetuated monuments. Frequently the trees on both sides of a line are of significantly different sizes which makes life easier for all concerned. If the owner on the other side of the line may have surveyed the line recently, you can look that up in the county court house and check the surveyor's figures and decide if you agree with them or want to run it yourself.
The big timber company abutting the proposed timber sale had hired Famous Flanagan to survey their line fifteen years ago before they cut timber. Flanagan lost his surveyor's license a few years back after decades of half assed surveys that never tied into anybody else's work.
Land surveying is the practice of trigonometry on an assumed plane. Guess what. The world is not a plane. That means there are continuous small errors, but most surveyors are able to duplicate the work of another surveyor to within a foot or two. Not Famous Flanagan.
To make matters worse, Flan decided that the original section corner he needed to end up at had been obliterated and so he pounded a piece of rebar in the ground somewhere and declared that the corner.
A section is a (generally speaking) square mile of land. A section corner is where four sections meet. Visualize the center of a playground "four square" game marked on the asphalt and you've got it. You want to be very, very certain that the original section corner no longer exists before you go setting your own because if somebody comes along later and finds it, there's egg on your face and your client isn't going to be very happy. As I've said previously, the original corner is the corner.
Ready-to-retire Roger and I went out to open up a road that lead to where the section corner should be. The snow had knocked over a bunch of doghair fir across the road so I took a matched set of small Husqvarna chain saws in the back of a pickup. I cut and Roger swamped the cut chunks of trees out of the road. Every once in a while one of us would move the truck ahead. After a couple hours, Roger figured that we had come far enough and it was time to look for the corner.
Roger had a computer generated printout that positioned Famous Flanagan's corner about forty feet from the original corner based on a comparison of the original survey notes' bearings and distances and Flan's. The aerial photo wasn't much help as the trees did not reveal any straight lines anywhere near where the desired corner ought to be.
I swiftly found a stunted fir with a line blaze on one side of it and Roger found the original corner. There was an old tin Bearing Tree tag on a high fir stump not fifty feet above the road. We wandered around looking for signs of cut brush where Flanagan would have had to cut a line of sight trail through the woods for his survey.
The original corner was last reported having been seen fifty years ago. We had a copy of the notes and promptly found a couple of bearing tree stumps that confirmed we were on target.
When a surveyor sets a corner in the woods, he then measures the bearing and distance to the nearest trees of any size and chops a face in the bark and scribes something like: T20S, R5W, S21 BT (Township 20 South, Range 6 West, Section 21 Bearing Tree) so future surveyors can verify the location with the original notes should the original monument be missing. Fir trees are popular for this around the Pacific Northwest as they pitch over the scar and thus preserve the scribing for centuries.
The original surveyors would chisel a similar legend in a handy stone and place it in a pile of smaller stones where they established a north south line bisected an east west line. Now we use stainless steel pipes with big brass caps on top that you can stamp the inscription into that will be clear for a long, long time.
I dug a little with my brush hook and struck a fairly sizable stone where the corner measured in from the surrounding bearing trees. I left it in place for Oscar to dislodge and examine later. We stumbled around in the bushes for a while looking for Famous Flanagan's new, improved corner but couldn't find it. Where ever it is, it is clearly a good bit more than forty feet away from the original.
The neighboring timber company is going to be more than a little interested in Roger's find. Even our reluctant managers are more than likely going to concede the need for a thorough subdivision survey of the section. To make matters worse, Famous Flanagan set several more interior corners within the subject section under the assumption that his rebar was the indisputable section corner. This means that all the corners he set, as well as the lines between them, are not where they should be.
The original surveyors surveyed only the outside of sections as they blazed section lines through the woods so the white settlers pouring into the Willamette Valley in the mid-1800s could identify and legally describe and patent the land they were claiming. They took up land by the section for the most part and most of them weren't interested in the hills covered with all those damned trees. (In fact, they cleared forest land for farming as fast as they could but the land out here is best suited for growing trees. Many farmers subdivided and traded cleared land out here for Willamette River bottom land near town.)
It was up to future generations of surveyors to locate the four section corners and four quarter corners of each section for later internal subdivision. Section corners are the corners of the section and quarter corners are found halfway between each section corner on the section boundary (adjoining sections usually share the same quarter corner), in theory, at half a mile from each section corner. Quarter corners get their name because if you draw a line east west and north south from the quarter corners, it divides the section into 160 acre quarter sections.
It is a good job that Famous Flanagan had already lost his surveyor's license because this mess would be an absolute guarantee that he would. Nobody knows who's trees the timber company cut fifteen years ago following Flanagan's blaze lines. It might be that it cut a bunch of our agency timber or it might be that it left a significant amount of its own timber standing. Possibly a little bit of both.
Famous Flanagan's latest discovered boner could cost the timber company hundreds of thousands of dollars in double stumpage. It could cost nearly the same in left standing timber that our logging will expose to the winds. The company couldn't really log the correctly surveyed timber if it had some standing, as it would have to drag it through 20 foot tall reprod plantations. It's a loser all the way around.
What will happen next? I suspect that our management is going to have to acknowledge the need for a complete subdivision survey of the section. Oscar is a cadastral surveyor as opposed to a private surveyor and his work is given more credence when it comes to survey disputes. Famous Flanagan's stock is pretty flat. I will likely be impressed as Oscar's assistant as I have several years of point setting experience. I can't wait to find Flanagan's rebar stuck in the ground. This should be a highly entertaining treasure hunt. Update to follow.
Norm
Copyright © 2004 by Norm Maxwell
Norm Maxwell is a regular contributor to West By Northwest.org. Norm Maxwell received the 2004 Best of West By Northwest award for his article, The Fire of South Canyon: Remembering Storm King. Tens of thousands of readers have "voted" with their mouse by their selection of this story. Visit Norm Maxwell's other pieces about land use, firefighting and life in the country and more at West By Northwest.org.
Norm's Notebook: Replanting with Cedar and Pine
Norm's Notebook: A Winnebago, Motorhome That Is
Norm's Notebook: Measure 37 Fallout
Norm's Notebook: The Wayward Bus
Norm's Notebook: New Bike and The Three Acre Wood
Norm's Notebook: A Helicopter and a Hometown
Norm's Notebook: A Different Kind of Pre-Emptive Strike
Norm's Notebook: "Goodbye Dear, I'll be Home in a Year"
Norm's Notebook: Dead Cars and the Six Million Dollar Manx
(Editor's note–Norm's "Dead Cars" story inspired a feature story in the Register Guard, "Heaps of trouble in the woods.")
A Homey Homage to the Homelite: The Stone Age of Powersawing
Take Two: Jackson Road
Norm's Notebook: Battling Broom
Norm's Notebook: A Last Look from the Big Rabbit
Norm's Notebook: From Forest to McMansion, How It Could Happen Here
Norm's Notebook: A Few Acres, a Few Chickens–Who Is Living on the Land Now
Remembering the 30 Mile Fire
Old Men and Fire
The Fire of South Canyon: Remembering Storm King
Wee-wee for BB
Norm's Notebook: The Story of the Spruce Tree, and Mosby Creek, a New Land Use Lot Adjustment
Mentoring Military Style
Three Dollar Hammer
Remember Fire Road
Home, Home on Fire Road and more.
© Copyright 2000-2004 by West By Northwest.org
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