History of Oregon's Land Division System
Surveying the Land
Until a few years ago, hidden away in a small Oregon State Park on Skyline Boulevard in Portland's West Hills, there was a short concrete obelisk on a point overlooking the Tualatin Valley. On two sides were engraved the words BASE LINE, and on the other two sides were the somewhat more cryptic letters WILL. MER. This was the Willamette Stone, the common reference point for all surveys of the Oregon Country.
Before 1785, there were two systems of surveying land and assigning right of ownership in common use in the United States. The New England township plan called for a survey first and then permitted claims only on contiguous properties. Claims were smaller and the close cooperation of neighbors was a necessity, but there were no conflicts and no wasted land.
The Virginia practice allowed people to claim up to 400 acres with an option of 1000 more before even having the property surveyed. Used widely outside New England, this system was chaotic and confusing, and sorting out conflicting claims required considerable administration and expense.
Thomas Jefferson witnessed this confusion and recognized the need for a new system in the Old Northwest Territory (the upper Midwest). He was on the committee that authored the Land Ordinance of 1785. Resembling the New England township system, it established a rectangular system of survey. The basic units of measurement were the section, one square mile, and the township, 6 miles square. The 36-square-mile townships enclosed 36 sections of 640 acres each, numbered by surveyors from 1 to 36. A portion of the township's mineral resources was reserved for the government, and section 16 was reserved for schools. A provision for support of religious institutions through the sale of public lands was stricken before final adoption.
This was all well and good, but there were settlers in Oregon before it became part of the United States. Thus, settlers did not have surveyed lines to block off their claims, and in any event, the rugged terrain of Oregon didn't lend itself to the grid pattern that the Land Ordinance of 1785 gave rise to in the Midwest. The early Oregonians resorted to a modified Virginia practice -- surveying land that had already been claimed -- since Oregon's first constitution had permitted claims of up to 640 acres, the same limit permitted by the 1785 Ordinance.
Land claims prior to the first surveys were laid out by metes and bounds -- that is, literally walking off boundaries and counting paces. These unsophisticated surveys later had to be translated into townships, ranges, and sections that were defined by proper surveys based on the Willamette Stone. A good example of this is the Trullinger claim near Molalla: parts of the claim are in sections 20, 21, 22, 27, and 28 of Township 4 South, Range 2 East. Trullinger's claim was found to enclose 646.70 acres, slightly more than the 640 acres he was entitled to have. Early settlers apparently got a "bye" on such discrepancies, as there is no record of anyone having overages stripped from their claims.
Almost immediately after Oregon became a US Territory, Congress passed the 1850 Donation Land Claim Act. It called for surveys on the ground to establish boundaries of existing claims, and it established the office of Surveyor General and created a Federal Court and Land Office at Oregon City, the first such institutions west of the Missouri River.
The survey of Oregon began on June 4, 1851, with the placing of the Willamette Stone. The base line was drawn from the Pacific Ocean to the Snake River. The Willamette Meridian was drawn from the Columbia River to California. It's easy today to look at a map and think that they simply drew in these lines, but it wasn't that simple in the mid-Nineteenth Century: they had to actually create the maps, following the imaginary meridian and base lines over hill and over dale, leaving stone markers as they went. Difficulties included rugged terrain, dense vegetation, cloudy or rainy weather, and the temptation for surveyors to take off to the gold mines to the south and east.
To fill in the maps, surveyors walked section lines and took field notes. They noted what they crossed and what they saw. At a later date, sometimes weeks later, a cartographer would make a township map from the field notes. These maps were often quite densely packed with information, showing section corners, subdivisions, types of terrain, vegetation, and artificial features such as roads, trails, houses, and areas of cultivation.
The original survey of Oregon City (T2S, R2E) was conducted by Joseph Hunt and was registered on June 30, 1852. The tail end of the Barlow Road, the last overland link in the Oregon Trail, is labeled simply, "Oregon City to Foster's." The road ends at George Abernethy's claim.
Reprinted with Permission from the End of the Oregon Trail Historic Center
http://www.historicoregoncity.org
