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Damaged Survey Monuments Being Restored

Lane County Surveyor’s Office Work To Repair Survey Monuments

Repairing damaged survey monuments is vital to help reestablish land boundaries for public and private land and speed up rebuilding efforts.

Bruce Bothel and Stuart Duce with the Lane County Surveyor’s Office have concentrated their efforts over the last year and a half visiting survey monuments affected by the Holiday Farm Fire. This is an important endeavor as these monuments are used to establish land boundaries for public and private land. Private land surveyors have also been busy trying to reestablish land boundaries for rebuilding efforts and these survey monuments are critical to their work.

The Public Land Survey System (PLSS), also known as the Rectangular Survey System, was a surveying method developed by Thomas Jefferson in the 1700s for the purpose of platting, or dividing, real property. The Rectangular Survey System divided the land into a grid of townships, each measuring roughly 36 miles square. Each township is further divided into 36 sections. Real property is described and located using survey monuments which were established in each section by Government Land Office Surveyors at the time the Rectangular Survey System was being laid out on the ground. It is the responsibility of the Lane County PLSS Corner Restoration Crew to maintain and perpetuate the position of these survey monuments.

The majority of actual PLSS survey monuments located within the Holiday Farm Fire are located at or below ground level and were not affected by the fire. However, state law requires each PLSS survey monument be “witnessed” by two to four reference points. Most reference points in rural areas consist of bearing trees. A bearing tree is an actual tree that is located close to the survey corner and has an angular and distance relationship to the actual survey monument. When a survey monument is disturbed or destroyed, the bearing trees are used to reestablish the survey monument to its former position.

Most of the damage was to the bearing trees, which have been burned, and tags, which melted off the trees. Lane County surveyors rehabilitate these references by stripping the bark and slope cutting the bearing trees, which helps preserve the stump from rot, and by adding fresh paint and bearing tree tags. This makes the existence of the survey monument easily identifiable to surveyors.

Reestablishing survey monuments and property boundaries is a collaborative effort of Lane County’s PLSS Corner Restoration Crew and private land surveyors, and will help support the rebuilding process for fire survivors.

Source: McKenzieRebuilds.org

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