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1890-vintage Fence Post Monument
Posted by Kent McMillan on November 6, 2010 at 2:25 amHere’s a monument that I made today out of the stub of an old cedar fence post that probably dates from around 1890. The stub of the old post was sound enough, but if I’d tried to drive a spike into it, it probably would have spilt. The 5 in. post was irregular, didn’t really have a definite center, and so would not have been that great a choice. What I opted to do was to drill a 3/8 hole in the stub and use a 3/8 in. lag bolt instead of a spike to fasten the stamped washer to the remains of the post. I punched the lag bolt and thought the result looked pretty good.
Yes, to the left of the stub of the post is a 1970’s-vintage 3/8 in. rebar that was set near the post to mark a corner that actually falls more than 20 ft. away. The 1890’s-vintage post is basically a witness stake on the line leading to the corner and the survey that placed the 3/8 in. rebar mostly just muddied the picture.
Kent McMillan replied 13 years, 6 months ago 9 Members · 22 Replies- 22 Replies
Are the bolt and washer centered on the stub? It doesn’t look like it in the photo. Did you not have your vise grips with you that day, or what is the reason the 3/8″ rebar is still in position? I, and I think some others, would have left it there but I thought you were in favor of pin-farm weed abatement, usually. It does look nice, just a couple of questions I had.
> Are the bolt and washer centered on the stub? It doesn’t look like it in the photo.
Yes, the bolt and washer are at the center of the stub. The photo is slightly oblique, so you’re seeing a bit of the side of the post.
> Did you not have your vise grips with you that day, or what is the reason the 3/8″ rebar is still in position? I, and I think some others, would have left it there but I thought you were in favor of pin-farm weed abatement, usually.
In this case, the actual tract corner is, as I said, more than 20 ft. away from the 3/8 in. rebar. I don’t see any particular reason to remove it. It is’t in conflict with my client’s land and, in any event, was so far away from the actual corner that there couldn’t be any confusion. The corner falls out in the county road pavement seen beyond the post and rebar in this photo. If I ever get hired to resurvey the tract of which the 3/8 in. rebar is supposedly marking a corner, that would be the appropriate time to revisit the question of whether the rebar is actually serving any purpose as far as that tract is concerned.
I’ll even give a tie from the real corner to both the 3/8 in. rebar and to the old stub of the post when I write a new metes and bounds description for the tract I’m working on.
Kent from way down Down-Under I read these and other posts regarding ‘pin cushion’ corners and wonder.
I wonder at why this can happen and what it does to the general publics perception of surveyors, surveying and the professionalism of it all.Here we would be investigated if this sort of thing happens and if we did something wrong would be made (by law) to correct it and if we persistently created wrong surveys then would be deregistered.
We are required by law to report erroneous surveys and marks placed in error.I know different countries have different ways of doing things, but reflecting on all this we are talking about one common boundary point that if say its a meeting point of 4 titles (parcels of land) then there is only one point.
Here we have Title (deed) measurement positions but that is not always the actual true boundary measurement as original 1850’s and beyond surveys get measured by far more accurate methods and prove the differences are valid. The actual boundary hasn’t changed, but the title (deed) measurement does.
Our legal system doesn’t have a problem with that and the one Title authority also accepts that as do the general public.
Thats not meaning any surveyor just rocks up measures a line and stamps his measurement on that line and changes the title. It doesn’t work like that.
If we differ by 6mm, 15mm etc then we just show it as such and record it in our survey notes. It doesn’t change the boundary nor the title.
Finding a peg in an undisturbed position is a primary form of evidence but it does need substantiating by measurement but measurement does not hold sway.I accept this is a lengthy discussion point.
I’ll try and upload an 1842 stone pile I found recently and a 1905 old marked reference tree. Just to see a bit from our neck of woods.
regards
Richard> Kent from way down Down-Under I read these and other posts regarding ‘pin cushion’ corners and wonder.
> I wonder at why this can happen and what it does to the general publics perception of surveyors, surveying and the professionalism of it all.
>
> Here we would be investigated if this sort of thing happens and if we did something wrong would be made (by law) to correct it and if we persistently created wrong surveys then would be deregistered.
> We are required by law to report erroneous surveys and marks placed in error.Nice photos, Richard.
To answer your questions: in this case, the fact that the 3/8 in. rebar isn’t marking the true corner is explained by the fact that the true corner is in the middle of the county road and the surveyor apparently felt obliged not to make a separate tabulation of the portion of the tract within the public right-of-way easement, but simply to describe that part of the tract that in his opinion lay outside the roads. That land area would ordinary be the basis for the computation of a purchase price, so it was sloppy but no great harm was done.
In this case, the other element to it in 1970 was, I’m sure, the fact that the land was probably worth about $400/acre and the amount of effort that seemed reasonable to either the buyer or the seller to try to unscramble a fairly scrambled situation didn’t seem to be much. So, in effect, the 1970 survey was made to try to estimate the quantity of land being transferred and the exact locations of various boundaries as reported by the survey are probably better regarded as provisional guesses.
I think that the general explanation is that in the US, where land surveying is an activity largely driven by market forces, standards tend to fall by the wayside very quickly. It isn’t admirable, of course, but the main counter-balancing force seems to be tort liability for mistakes more than licensing boards.
Richard
That’s what I don’t understand when you describe your vastly superior Australian system. Sometimes there are monuments that define property corners, usually our measurements will not match the record locations of those monuments exactly and that’s fine, the monuments ordinarily control, barring gross blunders. When the monuments get destroyed, then what, in your world? Can there not be differences of opinion as to where the property corner is located when the original monument is gone? That’s what pin-cushioning is, differences of opinions of where the corner is. Is one right and the other ones wrong? Who decides? Not arguing or criticizing, just curious.
Richard
> Can there not be differences of opinion as to where the property corner is located when the original monument is gone?
I suspect that in Tasmania where Richard is, the differences of opinion aren’t so great because the standards at which surveying was historically practiced were higher than in the US. So the sort of indefinite and/or ambiguous writings that seem to be common in some places in the US may not be in Tasmania.
Kent
Oh. Maybe that’s it. There seem to be far fewer trees and hills than where I operate, even fewer than your area, just from the photos I’ve seen. I haven’t actually been to either place. I realize it’s possible to do just as accurate work in mountainous, forested areas, just not as likely.
What I’m trying to say is that I can’t envision a land title system that wouldn’t at some point still involve conflicting opinions of competent surveyors as to the locations of property corners. Geodetic co-ordinates might be the ultimate solution, if the producer of the co-ordinates does his/her job perfectly and the future user of those co-ordinates say 100 years from the time they are produced has a reliable way of reproducing that location precisely on the surface of the Earth with the technology of that time and taking into account all the Loyal Olson factors I read about with glazed eyeballs, but high admiration.
Kent
> What I’m trying to say is that I can’t envision a land title system that wouldn’t at some point still involve conflicting opinions of competent surveyors as to the locations of property corners. Geodetic co-ordinates might be the ultimate solution, if the producer of the co-ordinates does his/her job perfectly and the future user of those co-ordinates say 100 years from the time they are produced has a reliable way of reproducing that location precisely on the surface of the Earth with the technology of that time …
I’m sure that geodetic coordinates are useful, but in the system of surveys that Richard Abbott has described in SE Australia and that may well be similar to what is pursued in Richard Sand’s part of Tasmania, simply leaving substantial monuments and a detailed record of the work is a very good head start on the problem of boundary determination. Only letting properly qualified people into the profession doesn’t hurt either, I’m sure.
Steve
Can there not be differences of opinion as to where the property corner is located when the original monument is gone?
Kent has a valid comment in that we have always had standards to work by. That said there have been some very slack surveyors who have now been found wanting.
Typical ones were fences always fitted title (original surveys) distances. They would setup sight down an old fence (goodness knows if that was the case) turn the original angle off the fence and proceed to layout exactly the original cadastre and lo and behold it fitted existing fences as shown in there survey notes.
Then there were the 6 link surveyors. They ALWAYS had reference bars at EVERY corner, both ways along the lines from that corner. Rarely did you find one yet alone several and in areas where you just knew they ought be there.
Then there’s the storey of a surveyor come to survey some blocks in a town and the townies set up a keg of beer in the middle of the street. The street wasn’t the width it was stated to be in the survey!!
Then another of similar age where a surveyor had his apprentice marking boundaries with him and when the young fella queried why the somehwat subtsantial misclose didn’t get to be looked for, was told ‘Got to give future surveyors something to work on’.So our ‘system’ has its moments.
We still do have very stringent standards and it does help. We also have a (generally) very cooperative bunch of surveyors here in Tasmania (remember we are only an island of 500000 people) and just about every surveyor is known of to each other.
Those that are sloppy soon get discovered and so it helps to keep the standards high.As to geodetic cadaster! I may be a bit old fashioned, or rather prefer to put my years of boundary experience before pure XY locations on the face of the earth as ‘The Gospel of Boundary Locations’.
I believe it inevitable in the future that someone will decide that is the way to go and while we are working towards that in as much as all surveys where a peg is placed by measurements has to be coordinated.(ie involving field survey and not just an old peg found and replaced in its original location without recourse to ‘theo and tape’).
Again our size means we cover just one zone and deal with just one coordinate system, so it makes life simple in that sense.
But many of us older surveyors here are concerned the ‘art of surveying’ will be overtaken by zealous modern surveyors in their shoes and suits with the latest and best micro GPS and say categorically ‘This is the NW corner of CT12256-25’ while at the same time miss an old peg hiding under about 20mm grass 300 mm away.
The training many of the new breed of surveyors get is one area of concern to the powers to be.So your system has evolved over time and just as we are small, you are huge so that also has to be taken into account. Its not excusing sloppy work but it helps in an appreciation of the complexity of the issues here.
Steve
Your concerns of geodetic coordinates trumping monuments is held by many here in the US as well.
This is a frequent topic of discussion amongst surveyors in Central Oregon. I like coordinates as supporting information or a way to retrace surveys, but I do think it is poor practice to not have durable physical monuments and accurate documentation.
Well the last time….
The last time we tried to fix pesky boundary problems, the Public lands survey system was created and implement. Over time there were at a dozen or so volumeswith pages numbering in the hundreds, created to explain how the system worked. After hundreds of law suits and hundreds of IBLA cases there are still questions for which there are not a lot of good answers.
Many problems could be addressed, by changing to a coordinate based cadastre system. But, any system created by humans will create new and unintented problems and consequences.
We accept boundaries and monuments that are wrong, all he time. It happens not all to infrequently that the courts pat the dilligent surveyor on the back and proclaims”Yes, you have done a fine job, you found the error, you found the right monument and you figured out where the boundary was supposed to be, but everyone else ignored where the boundary was supposed to be and they are living happily in some other location.” Then the court honors the incorrect other location, because that is what represents an equitable solution. This is all extremely oversimplyfied,but when you have hundreds of thouhsands of boundries, that may have never been located correctly in the first place, it is going to be near impossible to make them all fit within some math perfect scheme, without doing harm to the rights of the owners.
Do you suppose?
I wonder sometimes, if a previous surveyor might have set some metal,just so they could find the wood evidence again. Do you have a record that shows the rebar was menat to mark the fence post that was not found back in the 1970’s?
Do you suppose?
> I wonder sometimes, if a previous surveyor might have set some metal,just so they could find the wood evidence again. Do you have a record that shows the rebar was menat to mark the fence post that was not found back in the 1970’s?
No, the surveyor (in 1971, most likely) who set that 3/8″ rebar definitely thought he was marking a certain corner of a tract that actually falls out in the middle of the road more than 20 ft. away. He used the cedar post to locate where he drove the rebar, but it is clear from his description that he regarded the rebar as marking the corner of a tract that had originally been split off of one of the lots of the 1877 subdivision in 1892. That corner was described in 1892 as falling “in center of lane” and … still does.
Do you suppose?
well done Kent
Geodetic Coords on parcel corners
When the powers-that-be finally decide that the answer to pincushions is to put a geodetic coord on all parcel lines, that coord will still be just one surveyor’s opinion.
Just because Jacques de L’egg puts a coord on a goat stake does not make it the legal corner.
I know you all know that, but we keep hearing about how GPS coords put into the GIS will solve all these problems.
Geodetic Coords on parcel corners
i agree Steve; the ramifications of non-LSs using GIS for any boundary determinations must be kept in check by each of us, our professional societies, academia, and our legislatures.
dla
Steve
The US doesn’t have a title registration system. We are way behind the rest of the developed world in this respect. In the US your deeds are not proof of title but rather evidence of title. Same with all the survey marks and surveys. They are not proof of boundary location but rather evidence of boundary location. Much land has been titled (parcels created) without proper surveys and public documentation in the last 200 plus years. Surveyors are not clothed with authority to establish boundaries, instead the landowners do that with the assistance of a surveyor (sometimes, not always, more so now than in the past).
Title registration would be an answer to all the pin cushions and such. BUT, part of the title registration system is adjudication. Every boundary would need to be surveyed and the survey adjudicated by the land court. The surveyors with the high level of experience to do this work taking all into consideration (locating ESTABLISHED boundaries) are few in number to what would be needed to accomplish title registration in the US. It would take a long time, maybe a whole new bunch of properly trained and educated surveyors would need to come forth.
Solid geodetic coordinates are a proper part of a long term multipurpose cadastre BUT the time to collect the coordinates is after the parcels are adjudicated by the land court and the monuments are solidly in the ground. Take the markers out ofter that and we could put them right back where there were.
I’ve heard rumblings that going to title registration is something that the government wants to do. Surveyors should support the effort and join with the GIS folks in this. It would keep us all and many more, busy for a long time.
Do you suppose?
I remember meeting and receiving phone call from surveyors that disagreed with my survey because they refused to include any area that fell within county roads or any other possible public used roads in their survey.
Asking them why they felt they held the power to decide that a road being there meant that the property had been conveyed to the public was often answered with silence and a hangup.
The result were these slivers of land that inside roads that were held on the tax rolls for acreage still owned by the sellers and developers.
LDAR
There have been experiments in the Torrens system and the ghostly remants of that system still hovers ins some parts of the country and yes there are pincushioned corners found there as well….. no perfect system….
Well the last time….
Yeah…
I suspect that no person the face of this earth will ever live to see survey or land title nirvana.
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