Public Land Survey System

Awesome.

GLO and PLSS and section corners.

Did you say, did you ask the class how many surveyors are on Mount Rushmore?

I

For sure.

For sure.

Are both states PLSS states or either one of them meets and bounds?

Neither.

Guess what? They're all P.E.s.

And so I'm a big fan of creating licensure that is outside of PLSS.

Okay, you want to be a professional surveyor because you understand error budget.

You understand how to establish control.

To understand why that matters, you need to understand the system it replaced.

Since seventeen eighty-five, the Public Land Survey System had defined property boundaries across every state west of the Appalachians.

Independent surveyors general in each state hired local deputy surveyors.

These were men from your county, your region.

And then quietly, the system was restructured to make independent oversight harder.

What if the 1909 Resurvey Act was not about restoring accuracy? What if the Pickett Act was not about protecting public lands? What if replacing independent state surveyors with federal engineers was not about efficiency? What if each of those laws served a simpler purpose? Removing the people who could say no, the local surveyors who knew the ground, the surveyors general who answered to their states, the physical monuments that ordinary families could walk out and verify with their own eyes, replaced by calculations made in Washington by engineers who answered to a commissioner, by a Secretary of the Interior who was already on record serving corporate interests.

Your deed likely describes your property using language inherited from the public land survey system.

Section, township, range.