When I was a boy, I lived in the Midwest. If my father wanted to tell someone how to get to the farm from town (Apache), he would say fives miles west and a half-mile north. Everyone knew then how to get there even if they didn't have an odometer on the car, truck or wagon. One just counted off the roads, which occurred every mile, until the fifth road. Then he would turn north and go about the required distance. The mailbox name told which one of the two houses in the vicinity was the correct one. Townships consisted of a square of six miles on a side for a total of 36 square miles. Within one of these square miles, a farm might consist of the whole section of 640 acres or might be smaller, say the southwest quarter. There was a naming or numbering system for the sections so that it was unique.
At the somewhat other extreme of regularity, there is the metes and bounds system. This is what was used to describe Jacob Holtzclaw's grant that I mentioned in the last note. In that case the property description started with two hickories near Little Indian Run and went from there north 51 degrees east direction for 254 poles. One should have had a confirmation because there should have been a white oak on a "point". The next course was north 12 degrees east for 78 poles to another white oak. And so the outline of the property continues. There was no absolute system; any two hickories on a water course called Little Indian Run would have provided a starting point. Our eastern seaboard is a metes and bounds systems.
Prior to the creation of the Federal government and, for a short time thereafter, some of the colonies felt that their lands extended to the west an indefinite distance. Connecticut had a claim to land in Ohio. Virginia had the largest claim which included present West Virginia, Kentucky, parts of Ohio and land to the west of Ohio. After the Union was established, the eastern colonies were asked to relinquish their western claims. They did, but reserved land to use as bounty land for their Revolutionary War soldiers. As a consequence of their parentage, some of the states west of the Appalachians use a mixture of land description systems.
Thomas Jefferson had hopes for an orderly expansion into the new territories. He proposed surveying the land into square tracts, a radical idea for the time. One of the objectives was to eliminate the squabbles that arose over conflicting claims in the metes and bounds system. Many of the lawsuits of our early ancestors were on just this point. Person A claimed person B was trespassing on his land and person B might counter sue with a similar claim. But not only did claims overlap, claims often had voids or gaps between them. Later someone might claim this land and want access to his new property. The Land Ordinance of 1785 incorporated most of Jefferson's ideas.
Ohio was one of the new states which was to use this system of rectangular lines. But because Virginia and Connecticut had claims there which they were insisted upon retaining for use as bounty land, several systems of describing land came into use. Virginia continued with their metes and bounds system for the land they issued.
With some modifications in 1796, the rectangular coordinates were applied to a total of 30 states. Along the way, especially in Ohio, special districts came into being. For more information, see the Direct Line Software web page which you can access by clicking here on the URL http://www.germanna.com .
We gratefully acknowledge the work of John Blankenbaker who published over 2,500 Germanna History Notes via the Germanna-L@rootsweb.com email list from 1997 to 2008. We are equally thankful to George Durman (Sgt. George) for hosting the list and republishing the notes via rootsweb.com.