Thanks, as always, for the fine TR. My favorites of your TRs are those in which you teach about old-school land navigation using USGS topos and a compass.
In this one, I gladly learned about the origins of the PLSS. I had thought the processes had been originated after Thomas Jefferson, as POTUS, sent Lewis and Clark out for a look-see up the Missouri River, so along about 1805-1806 or so. It's very cool to find out its origins were some 20 years earlier.
Some of the founders and early prominent citizens were surveyors: some good, some not so good. George Washington was a surveyor. Thomas Jefferson was the son of Peter Jefferson, one of the surveyors who cut the state line between North Carolina and Virginia all the way from the Atlantic Ocean to the Cumberland Gap. Washington and Peter Jefferson were two of the good surveyors. Then came Daniel Boone providing many, many surveys of land in Kentucky and later in Missouri. Boone apparently "shingled" so many tracts so badly that he was dogged for his entire life by litigation resulting from his work.
There is a group of reenactors who appear at festivals/fairs in the garb of PLSS surveyors' and have a plethora of tools, instruments, and equipment used in the PLSS days. I had a ball talking with them at Bannack Days, Bannack, Montana back in 2010 or 2011.
Foy--bogged down in old English "metes and bounds" North Carolina, and son and grandson of civil engineers who made a living surveying.
