Fence disputes

[Waterlooiowa]

I live on the edge of a county wher there are no roads for 2 miles,and a river meanders back and forth on the county line.From the ground you can tell that something isn't quite square but if you jump in a plane you have a hard time seeing 2 fences that are parrallel and line up with another,especially where the 2 counties meet.

I know of one farm where the son-in law lawyer took care of splitting up a section 4 ways,the 1/4 section he kept ended up having 180 acres in it,but the other heirs always tried to get rent for a full 160 .

I had a relative that always wanted more rent because he had a "big 80".When it was sold and measured he only had 75 acres of ground

[BA Deere]

Yes, farmland lays in 3-D not flat like a map, fences that are boundaries +100 yrs ago were sometimes put in maybe "it`s too many stones here, why don`t we move 50 feet your way and it`ll be easier and i`ll give you a mule to make up the difference"  and people weren`t so crazy for land back then so it kind of worked out.

I have a place that that the county drainage ditch was put in in places that the neighbor could technically plant 8 rows here and there on my property..he`d be tresspassing to get to it 🙂 but that is a case where way back when, when the ditch was put in it was less digging on the neighbor`s side so the ditch got put in more on his side.  And as expensive as ditches were (and still are) it was a no-brainer to go where it was the easiest.

[bikinkawboy]

As the previous poster eluded to, surveying square sections of land onto a round world results in some odd areas.  Sometimes the result is a small 25-50 foot jog in a road or corner property lines while othertimes the correction is much larger and more obvious.  In my county, the northernmost row of "square 1 mile 640 acre" sections are actually larger rectangles with uneven sides.  On the west side, the smallest section is 763 acres and the section size grows larger as it goes east, where the easternmost section is 1043 acres.  To put it into perspective, that section is 1.6 times larger than a standard section. 

I also know that in Texas there are places where in the good old days, certain surveyors lacked real commitment to their job and as a result, no two sections are alike.  Rather than drag a 66' long chain over rattlesnakes and through the briars and brambles all day long, they instead set in a tent and wrote up legal descriptions while slaking their thirsts with ample amounts of whiskey.  I would suspect the mid-morning descriptions were the most accurate, being written after the morning hangover abated but before the effects of the morning's refreshments had kicked in fully.     

[sw363535]

Our chain guys were better than that but I am on the north side.........

Western Ks was surveyed from the North down  and western Okla was surveyed from the south up...  They came together on the state line......  They realized they were not going to come out together well so there are areas a few miles from the border where the sections got stretched a little and as they got closer together the sections get smaller...... They did amazingly well for the equipment they used....  Some of our young think a line that fades 12 feet in a mile is a terrible mistake that needs fixing.  but in the next mile it fades back.  It was a pretty great feat considering....

The line between the two states is actually two lines, coming together on the east and angling apart to the west end of Ks to be a little over 1500 ft. apart ( a no mans land strip but individually owned in small pieces and taxed by Oklahoma)  Which seems to be an admission of some sorts that the Kansas survey was right, and southern drinking might have been a factor  🙂   ....... But that is pretty good to be that close over a 400 mile line surveyed from two different directions with a chain!!!!!!

These days some of us probably cant find the Rockies without a gps cell phone.

[bikinkawboy]

As for what sw said about finding things with gps, one thing I did was teach my kids to read a road map and actually understand what all those different colored numbers mean.  Kind of embarassing if you ask me when a 12 year old kid can read a road map that an adult can't.  When one daughter was 12, I drove and she did map duty from Missouri to Disney World and back without missing a beat.  At 13 the other daughter got us from Missouri to Yellowstone and back.  Too many people have become so dependent upon gps that without it, they couldn't make it to the grocery store and back.   

[Kay/NC]

True. Mike's best buddy in high school could not reas a map if his life depended on it. It was a real learning disability.

[sw363535]

County intersection near here  looks like a big plus sign like most others, except the top half of the virticle line is 300 feet west of the bottom half of the intersection.......   because the latest county "engineer" didn't know which direction to measure from to line up the new northern road of the intersection with the south half done 60 years back........

When the new road staked 300 ft west of the established road, he declared the 60 yr old work "wrong"...and stubornly took 300 ft from the section to the west and built the road anyway...a 1/2 mile angle in the middle of an otherwise straight road...

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