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The Surveyor and Surveying

There are and have been many different definitions of surveying. For our purposes, we will use one that corresponds to what surveyors did in the eighteenth century. In short, surveying deals with the recording of the relative position or location of points on the surface of the earth for purposes of recording land ownership, mapping, setting borders, construction of buildings, or other engineering projects. It is, in combination, art, mathematics, practical science, and technology. At its simplest, surveying determines distance and direction, using angular and linear measurement, for any number of societal and cultural purposes. William Gillespie, in a mid-nineteenth-century treatise of the subject of surveying, reduced the concept of land surveying to three operations: measuring lines and angles, transferring those lines and measurements to paper according to a suitable scale, and calculating the content of the area measured.^[1]

In every case, what the surveyor measures and records is tied to the purpose of the survey. Surveyors divide their work into two general categories, cadastral surveying and geographic surveying. Cadastral surveying involves the determination of legal boundaries for purposes of recording ownership. Tese surveys, both the original and subsequent resurveys, set borders and provide a legal description of the parcel of land in question to give support to an owner’s claim to the property. Geographic surveying involves the making of maps and drawing borders for purposes related to concerns beyond a particular tract of land. Most of the surveyors known to us today, Charles Mason and Jeremiah Dixon for example, worked as geographic surveyors, sometimes referred to as geographers. Perhaps the easiest way to note the distinction is to remember that cadastral surveyors deal with local boundaries and their relation to other local parcels of land. The geographic surveyor deals with land and its position on the earth, determined by celestial and cadastral observations.

The cadastral surveyors mostly worked in anonymity. George Washington would not be remembered for any of his surveying work, except in the dusty property records of Virginia, had he not gone on to become a military and political leader. Most of the surveyors we recognize today would have been considered geographers. The Department of the Geographer reflects that distinction, their concern being more about recognizing the land and its features from a map or how to accurately delineate boundaries and borders.

Many writers on the practice of surveying throughout the eighteenth century referred to surveying as an art.^[2] But other writers refer to surveyors as “mathematical practitioners” who, beginning in the sixteenth century, turned surveying into a profession. The American profession followed the development of the European tradition , whose start coincided with the decline of the feudal system both in England and on the Continent. The colonial ventures into the New World in the sixteenth century increased the demand for precisely measuring and recording the surface of the earth. From that rose what historian Silvio Bedini called the “practitioner movement” of experienced craftsmen who were less concerned about advancing science than about finding ways to apply science, improve the world around them, and gain wealth in the process.^[3] The availability of seemingly endless land in North America quickly accelerated the need for mapping and staking legal claims to ownership. The number of practitioners expanded as they refined the quality of their surveys.

Surveying has been involved with the development of the human environment since the beginning of recorded history. Surveying may very well have been the first practical application of mathematics, and rudimentary surveying may even predate written history. Evidence exists that the earliest civilizations had methods of determining the borders of properties and constructing a building or structure that required accurate measurement of distance and direction. In the early civilizations of Mesopotamia,^[4] Egypt, Greece, and Rome,^[5] it was important to be able to delineate the boundaries of land regularly flooded in both the Tigris and Euphrates and Nile valleys. What we know of Egyptian surveying comes from a few artifacts and hieroglyphs. Ample evidence exists of their accomplishments and the methods and tools they employed. Egyptians were able to orient the pyramids very near a north–south axis and possessed knotted cords using the three to-four-to-five ratios of the Pythagorean right triangle. Their measuring device, the knotted cord, was treated with resin and beeswax to limit stretching and they used the plumb bob and various sighting devices to supplement the cord. With all that, it was not until approximately 1400 BCE that evidence exists of them using formal surveys for purposes of registering plots for purposes of taxation.

Land surveying in Mesopotamia seems to have paralleled developments in Egypt to a certain extent, with its own variations. Land along the Tigris and Euphrates Rivers was marked in such a way that borders survived the yearly foods and irrigations canals could be properly leveled for correct drainage. Mesopotamians invented an instrument known as the groma, which would later be used extensively by the Greeks and Romans. Horizontal crosspieces mounted at right angles on a vertical staf measured right angles. Each crosspiece had a plumb bob hung vertically at the ends to ensure it remained level. This apparatus allowed the surveyor to survey

straight lines and right angles. With the groma set up and stabilized, the surveyor and his assistants could measure direction and record distance. They could even survey inaccessible points by measuring a known point at a right angle from the inaccessible point, then measure a distance at a right angle and note the halfway point of that measurement. Ten, by moving at a right angle in the opposite directions of the unknown point until the halfway point and the unknown point lined up in a direct line, the surveyor could easily calculate the distance to the unknown point.^[6]

Improving on the groma, somewhere around 120 BCE, the Greeks invented a new surveying instrument known as the dioptra. Originally used to measure the position of stars, it became invaluable in surveying. More accurate than the groma and easier to use, in many respects it prefigures the transit or theodolite.Te dioptra allowed direct measuring of both horizontal and vertical angles between two points. It was used in many forms of Roman construction, including the aqueducts. The theodolite of the eighteenth century and beyond resembles the ancient Roman dioptra very closely.

Surveyors of all eras served four important but separate functions. The most basic, of course, was the measurement and recording of parcels of land to establish ownership. In addition, surveyors drew maps of larger areas that could be as expansive as a province or even attempt to map the entire globe. Tese maps required considerable speculation and attempts to draw latitude and longitude over areas that could not be directly measured. Military surveyors had the more direct practical duty of providing commanders and campaigners with an accurate assessment of distance, topography, and land features that might restrict military operations or might be used to the advantage of a force in the feld. Finally, engineering surveyors measured surfaces with the intention of placing or constructing artificial structures on the surface. Each of these purposes share a common need to know distance and direction, but each has its own special requirements for producing usable results.

For the English colonies of North America and later the United States, the measurement system for length and distance, based on traditional units, created its own set of problems for accurate measurement. Te English system did not lend itself to simplicity. For length, twelve inches equaled one foot; three feet, one yard; sixteen and one-half feet (fve and a half yards), a rod; four rods, a chain; forty rods (ten chains, 220 yards, 660 feet) a furlong; eight furlongs, one mile (5,280 feet, 1760 yards, 80 chains). For squared area, 144 square inches equaled one foot; nine square feet equaled one square yard (1,296 square inches); 272.25 square feet, a square rod; 160 square rods (ten square chains, 43,560 square feet, 4,840 square yards), one acre; 640 acres, one square mile (one section under the grid system); thirty-six square miles (six miles per side) one township (36 sections). Edmund Gunter’s measuring chain simplified measuring in the feld, converting feet and yards to rods (or poles).

Surveying in colonial America was a highly respected profession, below the highest rank of landowners or those politically connected to England, but at least equal to the professions of law, medicine, the church, or the military. Many surveyors came from the ranks of the gentry (Robert Fairfax serves as an example), and many more could claim a strong connection to the gentry (George Washington’s connection to the Fairfax family was his entry into the profession). Surveying skill, or having access to those with surveying skill, was required of those who tied their wealth to land. Of a study of 325 Virginia and Maryland probate inventories recorded between 1740 and 1810, 48 showed that the deceased owned some surveying equipment or tools at the time of their death and four of the first six Ohio governors had professional surveying experience.^[7]

Although it cannot be said that no wom1an ever surveyed in the eighteenth century, we have discovered no surveys credited to a woman.The first woman credited with performing her own surveys was Alice Cunningham Fletcher, an anthropologist who worked with Native Americans in the mid-nineteenth century.^[8] Yet unmarried women and widows would have had the same concerns land-holding men had about the status of their property. Tese women are perhaps more likely to have relied on other family or neighbors to survey their holdings, but it is certainly possible that some learned the relatively simple tasks of recording distance and direction.

There are records of slaves serving as trusted members of surveying parties, but since slaves were expected to be illiterate (though many were not), the likelihood that more than a very small number of slaves were in a position to lead a surveying party is remote. But it is just as possible, again even likely, that some slaves learned the tasks of recording distance and direction and their work was recorded under their masters’ names.

Free men of color, however, would have been deeply interested in knowing and being able to prove their ownership. Benjamin Banneker of Maryland is perhaps the best known of these free surveyors. Banneker, a free black from birth from Baltimore County, Maryland, had grown up on land owned by his parents and had prospered as a tobacco farmer. It was not until later in life that his intellectual curiosity turned toward mathematics and surveying. In 1771, the Ellicott family moved a short distance down the road from Banneker’s farm and built a gristmill. George Ellicott was a surveyor and amateur astronomer. Banneker’s reputation as an inventor and thinker preceded him and it was not long before Ellicott was loaning him books on astronomy, which Banneker mastered quickly. In 1791, when George Ellicott’s cousin, the well-known surveyor Andrew Ellicott, was appointed to implement the design for the new Federal City, now Washington D.C.,

Banneker was chosen as an assistant. Banneker, by this time, was sixty years old and found the work taxing. In 1792 he returned to his farm to concentrate on publishing an almanac for free black farmers, not all that different than Benjamin Franklin’s Poor Richard’s Almanac. Banneker’s Almanac included the phases of the moon and other astronomical date, tide tables, and other statistical information compiled and calculated by Banneker himself.^[9]

Surveying work could be quite lucrative for an ambitious surveyor willing to take on a large workload. For tilled land, most work was easiest to complete between harvest in the fall and planting in the spring, when deciduous foliage dropped for the winter. In those few months a surveyor could earn £100 in Virginia currency, an amount greater than most farmers or small merchants could net in an entire year.Tose working the frontier had the opportunity to scout for the best available parcels and claim them. Since the pathway to documentation of ownership for any parcel of land required an accurate survey done by a recognized surveyor, the surveyor became at least an intermediary in every land claim application and in most land transfers. A good portion, perhaps most of the work done by the appointed surveyors in the eighteenth century transferred land from crown, colony, or the United States into the hands of private citizens.

Each colony had its own rules for appointing surveyors. In colonial Virginia for example, the College of William and Mary approved county surveyors despite offering no courses in surveying or the practical mathematics required to perform accurate surveys.^[10] As a result, surveyors taught surveyors and the profession, for all practical purposes, regulated itself. George Washington, for example, needed and received the approval of William and Mary before he could take the appointment as surveyor of Culpeper County in 1749. The college appears to have accepted the required fee with no more than a recommendation as proof of his competency. Whatever the case, there is no evidence Washington ever attended the college or received instruction there.^[11]

The surveyor on the frontier might have lived outdoors for months as he worked. Even in the more settled areas of the colonies, surveyors faced every weather condition and terrain, depending on the time and condition. The survey of arable land was best done after harvest but before the harshest winter weather set in or in the early spring before planting. Once planting commenced, the survey might not be able to use the most convenient method of measuring the parcel. Frontier surveying required the clearing of visual lines of sight, which might require cutting of brush or timber in the way. Immovable objects, the large tree or unclimbable bank or wall, required the surveyor to measure around it through triangulation. For the surveyor in the colonies of North America, the eighteenth century became the proving ground for these techniques, which would not be significantly altered until well into the twentieth century.

Surveying has changed significantly since the eighteenth century. Surveyors now work with a combination of the long tried-and-true practices honed by surveyors over the last 400 years—utilizing elements of geometry, trigonometry, physics, engineering, programming languages, and the law. The surveyor in the feld can still rely on the chain to measure distance and a well-made surveyor’s compass to determine direction. Yes, there were innovations, such as the solar compass, which allowed surveyors to determine direction without relying on the earth’s magnetic field. But until the invention of the computerized calculator, surveyors calculated sines, cosines, and tangents, calculating by hand or, most often, consulting printed tables compiled for that purpose. The technology had advanced so far that totally robotic stations, which combine measurement and direction with field notes all in a computerized theodolite, operated with human supervision, are available. The advent of the Global Positioning System (GPS) has allowed for the recording of surveyed borders and property lines according to latitude and longitude precisely to the degree, minute, and second. But from the eighteenth century until the last quarter of the twentieth century, the practice and art of surveying was technologically quite stable.