Repository: UIHistories Project: Sophograph - 1890 [PAGE 49]

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ous law suits about land boundaries are evidence of the evils of this want of system. The worst, of it is, they cannot b < satisfactorily settled ; since, in some ca • . no man. sun or > or otherwise, can tell to an absolute certainty, win • the boundaries or corners should lie. About L784, Kufus Putnam, a brother of the Revolutionary hero, was sent out into Ohio to look over some land. The United States System of intended for the soldiers of the Revolution. Shortly after his return he wrote a letter to Thomas Jefferson recommendLand Surveying. ing that the boundari of tin? townships run north and south and east and west, and that the larger tra bould be divided into smaller pieces of land bj lin paralleled to HE public lands of the United States have been a great these. This was the germ of the pre nt Bystem. The first public lands of the United Stai were obtainm e of debate in congress, and the present system of laying thorn out and disposing of them was not the crea- ed by grants from the various states, that owned territory tion of any single person, but on the contrary, embraces in the Great Northwest, as it was called. A large portion the ideas of the great men of the country for many years, was afterward added by the annexation of Texas and .-till lie United Stat 9, Canada and Brazil, are the only conn- other portions by purchase. The continental congress aptrie-. S far ; I know, that have any order or system in this pointed a committee at whose head was Thomas Jefferson, O laying out of their lands. A brief consideration of the to report a plan for surveying the lauds granted by the aanner in which lands are laid out in New England will states. The committee reported May 17, 1784, su^gestim: that the land be divided into tracts 1 » mile- square, which » serve to - »w the utility of the rectangular system. There, BO the story goes, a man arriving from the old tracts should be sub-divided into tracts one mile squan world w Id turn out his cow when the snow was on the Congress adopted the plan excepl that theiii divisions were nd. and the Land ench d by her tracks would be his. to be ^c\rn miles square. In May, 1785, James Monroe proposed that the townI bare h of a d cription of a piece of land in Massaetts which 1 jan something like this: "Beginning at a ships, as they were called from thai time on. should be six Nothing point from the N. E. corner of John Smith's garden, miles square and this amendment was adopted. \ chains to the top of the ridge; thence along the top was said, however, about the number of sections in a town1 of the ridge 35 chains, etc.' The indefiniteness of such ship, so that, as the law now read, there were to be for: J are boondari'-- is evident. ' .nm--- were rarely established and nine sections one mile square in a township six miles nothing by whiob to establish one should it be lost, A few days afterward an amendment to remedy this defi j'j k and small one at that, are en with five,six or eight was proposed, but the motion was lost. Finalh on May '20. T even more. It really seems as if they tried to find the law was amended to read, "containing thirty-six section on! ho regular they could make tie- fields. The uumer- one mile square."

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