A. Each plat must have a point of reference.  Particularly in the case of creating a new tract of land, the point of reference can have a little more flexibility, but even then it should reflect back to the vesting description of the parent tract when possible (not only when convenient).  Our work is used by society, most commonly by real estate attorneys, for specific purposes.  If our work doesn't meet that goal, even if it checks a box on a board rule, then it is functionally deficient and can cause problems.  To aid our clients and their attorneys, we need to understand that a solid real estate attorney (I know, there aren't that many of them left) looks at the vesting description and tries to determine where and how our survey is located, and how it conforms with the vesting description.  This means that if the record POB (point of beginning, a term in legal descriptions that is similar but not the same as a point of reference as required by Georgia board rules) is a concrete monument or land lot corner, then a tie to a centerline intersection doesn't tell anything to that particular end user of our plat.  This is one common misconception that is especially painful in a typical retracement survey.

B. The point of reference shall be an established, monumented position which can be identified or relocated from ...

C. I stopped where I did with B to make it a point.  This is the essence of the rule outside of title description matters.  Sticking a nail or pin in the ground and cooking GPS on it for 3 minutes does not satisfy these requirements.  Granted, in theory a very precise state plane coordinate can be relocated using another GPS receiver.  That's great for surveyors.  If only surveyors were the sum of people who used our surveys after we completed them, we wouldn't be having this discussion.  Please think about that for just a minute.

D. The beginning of this board rule requires this to be shown on the plat as the first item of business:  "The direction and distance from a point of reference to a point on the boundary of the individual survey".  So, the theme here is that we are making every reasonable effort to let end users figure out where the property is, but also for other surveyors to hopefully be able to totally restore every corner on the survey should they all get tore out or destroyed.  It is also discussed and part of many boundary disputes, as this is how the law seeks to confirm or reject disputed property corners.

E. The rest of that rule goes on to say that the POR can be identified or relocated from: "maps, plats or other documents on public record, including state plane coordinates when applicable".  So, state plane coordinates can, by rule, certainly be used to help identify or relocate this established monumented position.  Also notice that it's at the end of the list, after maps, plats or other documents on public record (i.e. recorded plats and legal descriptions, but also maybe GDOT maps, USGS or NGS data sheets, etc.).  The very example that I remember being used to advocate for even putting SPC in the rule about PORs is for a tract in south Georgia where there are no land lot lines or the land lot lines are lost, you have an established iron pipe in a rock pile on the side of a road, and it's a 100 year old legal description.  In that case, it may suffice to call this pipe "the southeast corner of Quillan's farm as described in Deed Book 2, page 487".  That would actually tell a title examiner where they were and address the POB matter fairly well.  But, if the position of that pipe ever came into question, as does happen, it's not enough to put it back "with the same degree of accuracy required of the parcel surveyed".  So, one could survey 5280.00' out to the nearest road intersection, or one could cook GPS on that point to help us future surveyors have a chance at figuring out where you started your survey.  

F. As you can see, I don't undervalue or discredit the use of SPC on surveys, in fact I think its refreshing to see more of it.  What I want to stress though is that SPCs are not a POB, just a nice piece of auxiliary information for subsequent SURVEYORS who may need to use it to put your survey back on the ground if all else fails. 

Mark E. Chastain, PLS

          Much of my early career in surveying was in a rural headright region in east central Georgia.  I did all the courthouse research for the firm I worked for, frequently researching the titles back to the grants.  There is no natural stone in the area.  From the courthouse research and from performing surveys on the ground, this general pattern emerged:  When the original headright land grant surveys were conducted (generally, the early to late 1800s in that area), the surveyors often designated rivers and creeks for land grant lines, and otherwise they chopped trees along the lines, they marked the corners with chopped trees and wooden stakes (usually fat lighter or cypress), and they occasionally used existing stumps for property corners.  Because of the absence of the material, rocks or rock piles were never used, and any sort of metal stakes were never used.  Except in the relatively rare situations in which the original grants were subdivided, few resurveys were performed until about the 1920s.  In the early situations in which the original grants were subdivided, the surveyors marked the new corners with the usual chopped trees and wooden stakes (again, usually fat lighter or cypress).

          Beginning roughly about the 1920s, and the pace quickened as time went on, there were more and more resurveys of existing property lines and more and more subdivisions of existing tracts.  By this time most of the original line trees and corner markers had disappeared as a result of fire, decay, and being plowed up, so that in many cases all that remained to indicate property lines were possession lines.  The surveyors of this period, and up to roughly the 1970s, rarely set replacement monuments for the old corners that had disappeared.  Instead they measured along possession lines and made plats that often did not call for any corner markers, and they did not identify the possession lines they followed.  For the most part, the plats consisted merely of lines drawn on paper and bearings, distances, and an acreage.

          For conveying land, the grantors and grantees, who often were illiterate, usually went to the local justices of the peace rather than attorneys, to get the deeds drawn up.  The justices of the peace would draw up the deeds by copying the appropriate forms from a j.p. manual, filling in the blanks based on the information the parties provided, and the legal descriptions simply listed the names of the adjoining landowners as stated by the parties to the transaction based on their knowledge of who their neighbors were.  If a plat was available, it would often be referenced.  The justices of the peace usually knew the parties and the community intimately anyway so that they could almost draft the instruments from their own knowledge and without input from the parties.  All of this is apparent from the fact that practically all the deeds follow the forms given in widely-used j.p. manuals, and the fact that one of the witnesses who signed the deed almost invariably was a justice of the peace.  There were lots of errors made on paper, but they usually were not material to contemporaries since they were a close-knit society in which people usually spent their entire lives on the farms they grew up on, and therefore, in their own minds, knew who owned what and where the boundaries were.

          The result when we came along was that few of the deeds by themselves described boundaries; and in many cases, the only indications of property lines on the ground were possession lines, and these frequently were vague or nonexistent.  The best that could be said of the vast majority of the previous plats were that they were general diagrams of the shapes of the tracts they represented, based on where the previous surveyor guessed the lines were.  The mathematics on them were utterly useless for reestablishing property corners even when an identifiable corner marker could be found to measure from.  The distances given on the plats were typically 50 to 100 feet in error in a thousand feet, and sometimes more.  We had to get written boundary agreements between the adjoining landowners for about a third of the tracts we surveyed, and sometimes had to get boundary agreements all the way around tracts, before we could survey them.  We set permanent monuments--usually large concrete monuments for rural tracts, and one-inch rebars for residential and commercial lots.

          Regarding the point of reference/point of commencing problem, there are, of course, no land lot lines in the area where we worked, and there often was not a monumented street, road, or highway intersection within several miles of the properties we surveyed.  Most of the roads in the rural areas are dirt, are irregular, and they have no definitely defined rights of way.  The engineering of paved county roads, even when the right of way was deeded over to the county, was crudely done and the rights of way are not monumented on the ground.  GPS did not exist in those days. 

          The result was that the only monuments within or in the vicinity of many of our surveys were the monuments we set.  (We always researched both the property we were to survey and each adjoining tract, in the courthouse.)  Even if there was an existing monument, say, at the intersection of two dirt roads half a mile away, it was not logical to give bearings and distances from the monument along the road “right of way” to the property we were surveying because the road was irregular with no clearly defined right of way, and the right of way would, of course, shift over time.  When practical, we did tie in such monuments and gave straight-line bearings and distances from them to a corner on the tract we were surveying.

          In general, what we did was we tied in any nearby existing property corners, when available, that were on adjoining tracts that were not corners for the property we were surveying; we tied in any nearby geodetic monuments; and we showed bearings and distances to nearby road centerline intersections (as eyeballed), the bearings being rounded off to the nearest minute, the distances being rounded off to the nearest foot, and followed by “+/.”  Under the circumstances, I can’t see there was any other practical way to do it.  The only significant improvements in circumstances between then (1970s-1980s) and now are surveyors are getting somewhat better at placing permanent monuments, and the development of GPS.

          In drawing up deed descriptions, whether based on our surveys or those of others, the attorneys described the property generally, as indicated by the plat, referred to the plat in the description, and made sure the deed as well as the plat were recorded.  A full metes and bounds description, beginning at a point of reference/point of commencing, is not often used.  We always researched the property we were surveying, and each adjoining tract, in the courthouse, and thus were able to list the adjoining property owners’ names correctly, and we listed their vesting deeds and any recorded plats of their properties.  Besides providing some assurance that we had done our work correctly, this made it easier for anyone looking at our plats to visualize where the property was located.

          In laying out subdivisions in that area, many surveyors placed small wooden stakes for property corners.  When we resurveyed lots in subdivisions that had been laid out perhaps ten or twenty years before, in many cases nothing could be found on the ground that resembled anything like something a surveyor would have set.  Sometimes there were fences that supposedly were built when the original wooden stakes were still in place.  Sometimes the lot owners would show us a curtain rod, a brick bat, or coat-hanger wire that they said they stuck in the ground beside a wooden stake that was there when they moved in, they assuming the wooden stake was the corner, but it having subsequently rotted out and disappeared.  Sometimes, the best we could do was strike a line halfway between houses on adjoining lots to set up the common lot line, the assumption being that each house was roughly in the center of its respective lot.  And, whatever we came up with, we got the adjoining lot owners to sign written boundary agreements.  In many cases the resulting dimensions of a lot as determined by us varied five or ten feet in a hundred feet compared to what the subdivision plat called for--but nothing else in the subdivision could be made to fit any better.  Again, for tying down the location of the lot, we often had to resort to the methods described above that we used for rural acreage surveys because there were no other monuments in the area that had been set by surveyors.

          With reference to the headright area of the state in general, the work I have done indicates that many, probably most, headright land grant lines still exist on the ground as present-day property lines.  Ideally, all surveys in the headright region should be tied to the original headright surveys, and deed descriptions should reference the original headright grant and plat.  The problem is that the original plats and grants were almost never referenced in the subsequent plats or deeds, so that, after the lapse of 100 to 200 years, and more, it is extremely time consuming to do the necessary research to obtain this data.

          A serious omission, among several, of the State Board Technical Standards, as they are currently written, is they fail to recognize the areas of Georgia within the “headright” region that were originally subdivided into regular townships consisting of named and numbered tracts and lots.  For example, Savannah Township covers about 15,000 acres and is divided into rectangular-shaped named and numbered Wards, Tythings, Town Lots, Trust Lots, Wharf Lots, a Common, Garden Lots, and Farm Lots, as well as streets.  The townships that remain intact within the headright region of the state are Savannah, Augusta, and Brunswick.  Several other areas, including Abercorn, Ebenezer, Hampstead, Highgate, Vernonburg, Hardwick, Sunbury, Darien, and Frederica, were originally laid out into regular townships, but, as it turned out, the sites were not suitable for concentrated settlement and the original layouts were, for the most part, soon obliterated.

          Deed descriptions based on the original layouts are still followed for Savannah, Augusta, and Brunswick, and most of the original lines still exist on the ground.  See, for example, my post "Derenne Boundary Monuments" dated September 8, 2020.  These lines are analogous to land lot, district, and section lines in that they constitute the original survey.  Savannah Township was laid out in the 1730s and 1740s.  Title to the city common within it was vested in the city by a 1760 act of the Assembly.  The city of Savannah had the common gradually subdivided into additional named and numbered Wards, Tythings, Town Lots, Trust Lots, and streets, between about 1790 and 1850.  I have done a good bit of surveying in Savannah Township.  Both the original layout of the 1730s-1740s, and the later subdivision of the city common, were done with remarkable precision.

          In addition, the State Board Technical Standards fail to recognize that in the colonial headright area of the state, land grants were required to be given names at the time the grants were issued.  These names have generally been followed and passed down ever since in legal descriptions.  They are extremely useful because when one has been surveying or doing title research in the colonial headright area for a while, he or she becomes familiar with the locations defined by the names and can usually readily visualize generally where a tract of land is from the name alone.  Also, very good maps that delineate the tracts and label their names are available for Chatham, Glynn, and Camden counties.

          The original land survey subdivision designations, in the case of the colonial townships, or the tract names for the areas within the colonial headright area outside the townships, should be part of the description given on plats and legal descriptions surveyors make.  Yet, few surveyors really understand Georgia’s original land survey systems, which is very ironic given the fact that it is such an intimate and essential part of what we do.  Many surveyors in the coastal area are vaguely aware that tracts have names, they assume the names are made up on the spot and assume they are perfectly free to do likewise, they do so, and it causes confusion in title records because the names they make up and put on their plats are incorrect.

          It is conceded that it is not practical, for most of the inland headright areas, to describe the original survey/grant for a given tract of land; that few of the inland headright grants originally had names because, in contrast to the policy of the colonial government, naming grants was not required by the state government; and that the G.M.D. should therefore be listed.  G.M.D.s (Georgia Militia Districts) were not originally intended to constitute a component for land descriptions and they thus do a crude job for that purpose, but that is another story.