In the Seventeenth Century, high mortality rates and constant immigration meant that the original patentee often held land for only a few years. If the requirements of developing the grant were not met before an owner died and the patent lapsed, the land was restored to the public domain. Frequently, English heirs sought to sell a distant Colonial inheritance to new immigrants or local speculators. Real property held in trusteeship for minor orphans eventually required surveying for the division that would settle the estate.
By the Eighteenth Century, complicated partitions of land among resident heirs were common routine for surveyors. That century's highly mobile and rapidly increasing population not only pushed westward at a remarkable pace, but also flowed from county to county within the long established sections of the Colony, buying and selling farms with each move. For instance, in Elizabeth City County, on the lower western edge of Chesapeake Bay, between 1782 and 1810 over one-third of all farm owners kept their land for five years or less, while 72% held the same property for fifteen years or less. A minority of these people lived on the same land throughout their adult lives. Although many of these private real estate transfers were accomplished without benefit of surveys, the volume of acres annually passing from one owner to another in Colonial Virginia provided substantial employment for surveyors.
Unlike New England, in the Old Dominion, where plentiful land was the basis of economic wealth and social status, there were no effective restraints to inhibit its marketing as a commodity. English traditions of primogeniture and entail were written into Virginia statutes, but ignored or circumvented in practice. Rich and poor alike haggled in private and in court over land parcels worth fortunes or a pittance. Even though most individual acres were of small value, the frequency and importance of land transfers in the Colony hastened the growth of the surveying profession and enhanced the prestige of its practitioners.
But the Colony's policies for distributing the public domain and its citizens' preoccupation with acquisition of land do not entirely explain the special position of surveyors. In Virginia, cadastral (official) surveys of public lands could only be performed by authorized official surveyors. Their monopoly of the most lucrative work left little scope for development of private practice. From 1624 to the end of the Eighteenth Century, virtually all surveyors were government officials paid by fees collected from their clients.
The origins of the custom of appointing surveyors in each county are difficult to trace in the sparse documents that remain from Virginia's earliest years.
(14 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.