On the occasion of the Bicentennial of our American Independence, the Virginia Surveyors as a formal group decided to issue a book on the history of surveying in Virginia up to 1776. They obtained the services of Dr. Sarah Hughes to research the material and to write a book of her findings. Though the book has been in print since 1979, copies are still available [Virginia Association of Surveyors, Inc., 6001 Lakeside Avenue, Richmond, VA 23228, but beware that this is the 1779 address].
Surveying in Virginia has been closely connected with the College of William and Mary, which was chartered in 1693. There were two basic reasons for this association. The College certified men as trained in the theory and practice of surveying. In return, the College obtained one-sixth of the fees collected by all of the surveyors. This was a significant funding source for them.
From Jamestown until 1693, the practice of surveying was not always in the best of hands. There were enormous difficulties in both theory and practice. And the early surveyors were not always honest. That there were problems was recognized in a Virginia Statute of 1705 which tactfully put the situation as, "The quiet of our estates, in a great measure, depends upon the faithfulness, understanding, and care of our surveyors." The men who could measure the metes and bounds of the fields [usually forested] held the key to transforming a worthless uncultivated territory into individual farms. Until it was surveyed, one’s claims were in doubt. But still late in the 1600s, an English surveyor reported he had seen young men in America who were confounded by the problem of transferring a specified acreage and rectangular dimensions to a terrain cut through with creeks, marshes, and ridges.
In common with the European practice, each parcel of land could be of any size or shape. It was described by metes and bounds running in arbitrary directions from a random starting point. There was no grid of preexisting lines or grids to guide them. There was a big difference between Europe and Virginia though. In Europe, nearly all of the surveys were conducted over open lands. In Virginia, most of the surveys were through forests, where it was difficult to see a desired end point. After a survey was made, it was not easy for anyone to see whether a new survey conflicted with an old survey.
More difficult for the modern person to grasp is the state of mathematics at the beginning of the Seventeenth Century (say 1600). The first simple arithmetic text in the English language was published only seventy years before the colonists landed at Jamestown. Books on arithmetic and geometry were expensive and difficult to obtain and instruction was seldom offered. Logarithms had not yet been discovered in 1607, while decimals and fractions were poorly understood.
(02 Feb 05)
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.