There were many differences between the English surveyors and the Virginia men. The best English surveyors of the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries were competent men who devised methods for more accurately running property lines and computing the content of the acreage within them. They invented better instruments and applied new mathematical concepts. These English men laid a sound basis for the practice of surveying in the Nineteenth Century.
The Virginia surveyors fell behind in adopting the new methods and instruments available in England in the Eighteenth Century because the conditions they faced were very different. Speed was more necessary than accuracy and simple instruments were more practical for men who tramped for miles into virgin forests.
Ironically, the technological superiority of the English surveyors was not translated into social recognition comparable to that of the Virginians. Though land values were increasing and skills were improved, the social status of the English surveyor was not high. Still, he had steady employment and good wages. Members of the middle class, they were not admitted to governing class nor patronized by aristocrats, as were mathematicians and astronomers. They had little personal access to ownership of the land they measured.
Land was the cheapest of the American resources and virtually free except for the charges of surveying and patenting it. In Virginia the surveyor often held the key to the riches so widely coveted. He had a discretion over recording entries. His willingness to go into the field might determine which individual obtained title to choice tracts. Frequently, the outcome of disputes rested upon his work and testimony. As he worked, the surveyor had opportunities to spot good acres to patent for himself. Before long, he might be a member of the landed gentry.
In Virginia, there was little difference whether one was getting land from the crown or from the Northern Neck proprietor. There were vast differences in the process of land distribution between Virginia and New England. The Puritan colonies controlled development by granting blocks of land to communities or towns whose boundaries were surveyed prior to division into tracts for smaller individual farms. Virginians abandoned such planned growth in favor of indiscriminate location of larger private plantations.
When the Virginia Company was in charge of the early government of Virginia, they adopted the policy of dividing land into multiples of fifty acres as it was patented by individuals. When the Company dissolved in 1624 and the land reverted to the Crown, this system of granting fifty acres for each person who settled in the colony was retained.
(07 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.