If you’ve ever wondered over the
deed to your homestead or the strange designations you’ve seen in your real
estate tax bill, you’ve come face to face with a legal description.
Ever since man started slicing up
the earth and deciding which pieces of it belonged to whom, there has been
a need for defining exactly where any given piece of land might lay.
In early Britain, this was handled in a memorable fashion: the policy was
to take a young child from the neighborhood, lead him one by one, to the
corners of the tract of land in question, then give him a severe thrashing
at each location.
The theory was that the child
would long remember each spot (if beaten with sufficient gusto) and could
testify to it’s location long into the future.
Today’s coddled children have it
easy: we just record a survey at the county recorder’s office, but when we
walk around the perimeter of a property, we still call it, “beating the
bounds”. That’s how the phrase originated.
In most of the United States,
rural land is described according to what is referred to as Government or
Rectangle Survey, or less frequently, the Public Land Survey System, or much
less frequently, the Aliquot system. It's
used in thirty of the most rural states, including Alaska, but excluding
Texas.
Here's how that works:
First of all, a series of
base-marks has been established for all of the continental U.S.
Lines running north to south are referred to as "meridians" and east-west
lines are called "base-lines".
Here's a map showing all the
meridians and baselines.
You'll notice that the Meridians
converge as they go north. That, of course, is because of the
curvature of the earth. Most of the effort involved in this sort of
land description relates to different ways to describe squared boundaries on a
spherical globe. It's like trying to put a postage stamp on an
orange, you've got to figure out ways to iron out the wrinkles.
Starting from a baseline and a meridian line Township
Lines and Range Lines lay out a grid of six-mile square blocks. For
example, the first line six miles north of the Base Line is named Township
1 North of the Base line and the first line six miles west of the
Meridian is Range 1 West of the Principle Meridian. The block that
those two lines form is called Township 1 South, Range 1 East, or T1S,R1E.
