1880-2010: The story of a section corner

To be a surveyor is to be a detective.  Think of your favorite detective on a TV show or in a book.  They encounter a puzzle they want/need to solve.  They follow all the leads they get.  They talk with lots of people who might have information about the puzzle.  Some information takes them to dead ends.    Sometimes they get a lucky break when someone has information relating to the puzzle they didn't realize was important.  There are also times when information leads them directly to the answer.  In researching land for surveying, the same process happens.  Happily for me, I love mysteries and detective stories and find the twists and turns of Dorrel's research interesting to hear about.  Maybe you will too.

First, a little background.   Before the government could sell  property to individuals, they needed to be able to convey an exact piece of property.  They divided the country up into a grid of one mile square sections by having their surveyors lay out monuments in one mile grids. The surveyors would set a monument then go directly north for one mile, then set another monument, then go another mile north and set another monument, etc., etc.  Then they would do the same in the east, west and south directions until the entire area was full of a grid of monuments one mile apart.  The monuments (the markers they set at the one mile intervals) included: cedar posts, ash piles, rock cairns, or any other inexpensive and readily available materials (they even used dinosaur bones in one area in Wyoming).  Whether or not those corners were placed exactly a mile apart does not matter, the government sold the property between the monuments to the settlers.  The monuments were the official corners of the properties the government sold.  In order to survey a piece of property, surveyors today are required to recover and use those same monuments.  They are the legal corners of the properties.  Due to the nature of the original monuments, they have faded away and been replaced by new longer lasting monumentation like iron pipes, rebar, and concrete monuments with brass disks.

Surveyors are not content to accept just any old monument they find, they want to know how it got there and make sure it is in the same location as the original monumentation placed by the government when the land was originally divided.  Following is the story of how Dode researched the background of one of the original corners on the reservation. 

While preparing to convey parcels of land to the Native Americans, the federal government in 1880 conducted a survey of the Tulalip Reservation and placed a grid of monuments as described above.  The monument we are interested in for this blog post is known as the NE 16th of Section 24, Township 30, Range 4.  In 1880 the government surveyors set a 4" x 4" cedar post as the monument for this point.  It is not surprising that the post has long since dissolved.  In 2009, Dode searched around the estimated location of the corner and found not a 4x4 cedar post but a rebar with a plastic cap.  On a nearby tree, he also found a metal plaque inscribed, "Scott Paper Company 16th Corner" which included a bearing and distance to the rebar.  It was dated 1974.  Talking with Tulalip Forestry department, Dode discovered they had found the plaque six years previous folded up and embedded in the bark of the tree.  The foresters had chipped it out, flattened it, and re-attached it to the tree.  Some one in 1974 believed the location of the rebar and cap was the same location as the cedar post that had been set in 1880.  Remember, the location of the cedar post set in 1880 and not location of the rebar and cap controls the legal boundary of the properties in this area.  Is this rebar in the same location?  In an effort to discover how the cedar post morphed into a rebar, he set out researching.

The plastic cap attached to the end of a 1/2" rebar driven two feet into the ground.

The plaque on a nearby tree.

The cap on the rebar had the state number for a land surveyor stamped into it.  Dode went back to the office and got online to search the county records for surveys done in that area in the 1970's and found nothing.  Doing additional research online, Dode found that the Scott Paper Company had been sold to Kimberly Clark.  He knew that in the 1970's, a lot of timber companies like Scott Paper would do surveys for their own use and not record them.  Maybe Kimberly Clark would have information about the rebar.  Calling to the Kimberly Clark North America Headquarters customer service, they gave him the number of the head office back east which then referred him to a records office in Georgia. After several back and forth phone calls, he received a call from a records person in the local office (Everett, WA) who said he couldn't find any surveys for the property.

Stumped but not defeated, he used the number off the rebar cap to search the state database of land surveyors and found the name of the surveyor who had placed the rebar.  With a name, he googled the land surveyor and found his home number.  He is in his 70's and lives in Arlington.  A phone call to the home of this surveyor found that he was semi retired (he still did occasional surveys out of his home office).  He looked through his files and found a survey on the property from the 1990's and with a new date Dode was able to get a copy of that survey over the Internet from the county records.  On the survey, the surveyor had commented that at that location, he had found a 2" hub set by Jerry Peterson of the Scott Paper Company.

Before we go on, let's review what we know.  The rebar and cap had been set in the 1990's by a surveyor who was working for a local resident, and the plaque on the tree had 1974 and Scott Paper company scribed on it.  The surveyor had found a 2" wood stake set by Jerry Peterson of the Scott Paper Company.  How did he know the 2" hub had been set by Jerry Peterson of Scott Paper?  A call back to the surveyor really did not help.  He could not remember.

Dode had worked with a Jerry Peterson a few years ago while at Downing & Assoc.  Was this the same Jerry Peterson?  It turned out he was.  Dode googled and called up Jerry at home and found Jerry had worked for Scott Paper and remembered being out there in the 1970's but couldn't remember that exact corner or any details.  Jerry referred Dode to his old boss from Scott Paper, Bill Rollins. 

Googling him yielded a phone number and he found a retired 70 year old Mr. Rollins who remembered surveying out there.  Mr. Rollins said they would not have set the hub, it would have been something they found.  He said he would have put a plaque on a tree, hence the origin of the plaque the forestry department found six years ago.  Jerry and Bill would have recorded their findings in some field books which would have been saved and may have been handed on when Scott Paper sold the property.  Dode spoke again with the Kimberly Clark records person in Everett, mentioning he had spoken with the two men who had been standing in the woods 35 years ago setting those corners and that their notes were turned over to the company.  The Kimberly Clark employee looked through his records and while he didn't see anything, the original field workers were welcome to come down and look for themselves.  The question remained, if they didn't set the 2" wood hub, who did and was it in the same location as the original cedar post?

This wasn't the only monument he was researching.  1/2 mile away was another one that he was doing the same kind of detective work on.  Through another rebar and cap, he found another surveyor's number.  The state database gave him a name, city (Centralia), and the fact that his license was still current.    Google wasn't getting Dode anywhere with contact information so he started calling surveying companies in Centralia asking if anyone knew of the mystery surveyor.  He found out he was semi-retired and currently surveying out of his home and was given a home phone number for him.  Talking with the Centralia surveyor, Dode was given a quick life history and found that this surveyor had done surveying for Scott Paper for years.  Alarm bells started ringing; this surveyor still had all his old notes and was happy to send Dode a copy.  Finally Dode would have the survey notes from the 1970's showing why the Scott Paper surveyor believed that was the location of the original cedar post.  Dode waited two weeks for the notes, when they finally arrived it was discovered the notes had made it to Dode's building twice, but the first time the mail room shipped it back unopened (that surveyor had to make two trips to the post office and pay for the shipping twice).  Unfortunately, when they came in, they were for a parcel of land in the area but a parcel entirely unrelated and done for an entirely different party.  The Centralia surveyor didn't have Scott Paper's old records.  Another dead end!

Two months later, while researching another corner by studying the Department of Natural Resources web site, Dode found an obscure reference to the DNR possessing Scott Paper's old records.  Dode remembered the corner he'd been spent so much time researching and contacted the DNR to see if they Scott Paper's record of that corner.  The DNR confirmed they had some Scott Paper records for a surveys done in that area but they were not sure which one was the right one.  The DNR agreed to email all the records.  Dode waited and waited and waited for a response.  Waiting on the government!  About two weeks later, he found a way to access their database online and did the research himself.  (He later found a timely response to his original request emailed from the DNR in his junk mail folder.)  Finally, it was there that he finally found the missing Scott Paper record.  What did it tell him?

Scott Paper's record stating what they set and why they set it where they did.

Jerry Peterson of Scott Paper had set a post and it had not been set in the location of the original cedar post.  Scott Paper had determined the original location of the cedar post was lost and unrecoverable.  They had used the legal method of replacing it called "Single Proportion".   Dode called Jerry back and he discussed the methods and equipment Scott Paper would use for laying out surveys.  Jerry remembered they did there own surveying (no one was certified or licenced) using a compass and chain to set the corners (a very rudimentary set of equipment accurate for only small distances.) 

The final answer:  The corner had been illegally set using outdated equipment by an unauthorized individual using a legal method.  That incorrectly placed location has been used by surveyors for 35 years.  None of them had done their research to find how Scott Paper had established the location and now any surveyor that comes upon it must decide if he will use the location his peers have been using or if he should set his own conflicting corner.  A surveyor is always concerned with what will happen if his decisions are called into question in a court of law.  The cases are decided by judges who aren't required to be survey law experts.

To be a surveyor is to be willing to dig and pick at a mystery that others would throw their hands up as unsolvable.  It's much more than standing on the side of the road looking through an instrument.  More than placing flags in trees.  More even than making a legible map.  Most of what a surveyor does is behind the scenes where the customer never sees it and the only one who knows about it is his curious wife.  Do you see now why it can be so expensive to obtain a survey?  And Dode can rest safe with the knowledge that long after he is retired from the industry, young freshly minted surveyors will be searching for him to question him about decisions he made 35 years ago.