Drawing the LI Line

[Ted Samsel]

David C sez:
> 
> Richard Romeo sez
> >Very interesting article in the Times yesterday about the many confusions 
> >regarding the boundary lines  on Long Island and how even the folks who 
> >live there have a hard time sometime figuring out which township or 
> >village they live in.
> 
> A-and last week I was on vacation in the Eastern Sierra, adjacent high 
> desert country, and Mono Lake area, about as empty and open a region as 
> you can find in California, where you can look across 60 miles or so of 
> the Great Basin and know there are boundary lines out there somewhere 
> 'cause White Mountain is in Nevada, but that fact is rendered laughable 
> by the vastness; and there I learned about the Mount Diablo Baseline, 
> which is defined by the eponymous peak in the Bay Area, 'way out on a 
> West Coast that seems like another planet, and runs East to that "Nevada 
> border" out there in the shimmer.  Seems the Spanish colonists did their 
> demarcation with goofy language like "a hundred paces from the great oak 
> tree by the creek," and one of the first things the Americans did upon 
> taking over was to impose an abstract, statewide reference grid.  It 
> turned out to be useful in the subsequent process of cozening the Spanish 
> landowners out of their holdings.
> 
And depending on what part of Spain they were from, their unit, the vara,
would vary. In Texas, depending on which order built the mission and where
the order was originally from, I recall the Castilian vara, the Andalusian
vara and the Aragonese vara.

And such verbal property descriptions are not uncommon in county land
office records even today. I know several ex-surveyors who made their
"fortune" finding slivers of land that were not taken into account in the
tax records and paying the tax on them. Then they would be able to
cahrge for access to various tracts of land that were formerly accessible
by the owners, sometimes making a more than tidy profit....

Whe I was working in Illinois, one of the historical archeologists was
able to produce a description of pre-settlement vegetation patterns by
taking the verbal description of the surveyor's note (i.e. "laurel
hell", "Shinnery", etc) and construct a low-rez "raster" image of the
historical landscape using the township and range lines as the grid.

Ted Samsel....tejas at infi.net