Introduction

Over the course of the eighteenth century, in what would become and then was the United States of America, the profession and practice of surveying helped define the nature of private real property and how governments would protect it. Both the French and British competed for control of the lands west of the Allegheny Mountains despite the presence of indigenous peoples, and there was nothing inevitable about how the story played out. It was not inconceivable, for example, that the French might have prevailed on the battlefields of Europe in the Seven Years’ War, which no doubt would have had consequences in the Americas. But the sheer number of English who had migrated to the eastern shores of North America and continued to migrate made French domination unlikely south of the St. Lawrence River and Great Lakes in the long term. However, none of what happened was inevitable.

This book looks at what did happen. Great Britain and its successor the United States came to control the land beyond the Alleghenies, eventually all the way to the Pacifc Ocean, for a number of reasons: sheer numbers, proximity, and a policy regarding private property and its ownership that made possession of the land and the documentation of its ownership central to a developing capitalistic economy. Documentation required surveying and accurate recordkeeping, determining who owned what to the exclusion of all others. Te Native Americans had no such concept of permanent land ownership. They claimed what they occupied and often defended it to the death. They planted crops, hunted, fshed, and built villages, but land was owned in common, not by individuals. Eventually, they abandoned their claims when forced out by Europeans. To the English, who came to dominate North America south of the St. Lawrence River, being an individual landowner was part of being a person of consequence. From the proprietors of entire colonies to the fifty-acre headright yeomen, owning land went a long way toward defining a person.

The profession of surveying, in its American context, grew from this hunger for land as a source of wealth. By way of definition, surveying is the act of determining points on the land surface by measurement. The professional who performs this accurate measurement is known as a surveyor or land surveyor. Accurate surveying combines any number of professional skills: the application of science and mathematics, facility with precision instruments, attention to detail, and the art of rendering measurements into plans, maps, and legal documents. Historians of technology note that technologies are not simply collections of convenient devices and the inventive application of scientific principles. Technologies must serve, or create, an addition to a society’s way of life, its culture, no matter how simple or complex or how much time and expense any invention might save. Without serving that cultural or societal function, technologies become curiosities, sometimes in a very short period of time. If successful, a technology may even shape a culture as it is accepted and disseminated. While surveying, at its most basic, is simply measuring distance and direction and recording it for a specific purpose, it served humans and their relationship to the earth and their need and desire to impose their will on the environment.

In the United States of the twenty-first century, surveying professionals are licensed by the individual states, confirming their skill and dedication to the ethical practice of the profession. In the last seventy-five years, technological development, through laser measuring, global positioning satellites, advanced calculators, and computers and their accompanying software, has increased the accuracy of surveys and made some of the more tedious elements of accurately recording data nearly instantaneous. But previously, surveyors relied on tried-and-true instruments and technology developed prior to 1800.

This book examines the development of the profession in the part of North America that would become the United States in the eighteenth century. As early as 1720, surveyors, instrument makers, scientists, and mathematicians had invented most of the technology, developed most of the methods, and learned most of the mathematical concepts needed to produce accurate surveys, at least at the local level. From that point forward, advancements in the ability to produce precision instruments and determine longitude incrementally produced a stable system of surveying that would continue to be used until the middle twentieth century and is, to some extent, still in use today.

Every building, every map, every piece of property bought or sold was measured for some intended purpose by a surveyor or team led by a surveyor. “Intended purpose” is key. The simplicity of a survey of a single plot of land, especially one that bordered a stream or another property, gave way to mapping, which dealt with distance, direction, and topography quite differently than a simple border survey did. A military survey could include mapping or just assessing the offensive or defensive potential of operations on a particular field or terrain. Border surveys had to be more precise yet. An error of a fraction of an inch at the outset could result in a cumulative error of many feet or yards over the course of a long-distance survey. The grid system that became the legal basis for the division of most land controlled by the federal government had to treat the land between the section and township lines as if it were level. The next section or township had to be exactly six air miles or one air mile distant from the last surveyed line, which required every chain measurement to reflect the straight-line, level distance from the previous recorded point. Without accounting for changes in elevation, the next section or township line could not be straight. Surveyors of the eighteenth century had the tools and experience to draw these divisions.

One of the central characters in the development of our story is none other than George Washington, commander in chief of the Continental Army during the American Revolution and first president of the United States under the Constitution of 1787. Washington began his professional life as a surveyor and remained connected to surveying in its various forms for his entire life. From his days as a young man until the weeks before his death, Washington understood surveying and its connection to land ownership as the path to wealth in America. Over the course of his life he became one of the young nation’s great landowners. A portion of his military success can also be attributed to his understanding of topography and how to use it to his army’s advantage. As president, he supported the development of the grid system by which the Northwest Territory, and eventually most of the land within the United States, would be measured and distributed. Using Washington as a central figure in this story is not an exercise of historical determinism or revering of a great man as a means of oversimplifying the complex. Washington was at the forefront of the profession of surveying, helping the nation grow, to his benefit and that of his fellow Americans. To Washington, surveying connected him to land for which he had a lifelong affinity and saw as a source of wealth, a necessary part of military success, and the basis for the prosperity for a new nation facing both opportunity and risk.