How to Read Land Descriptions

or

Everything You Always Wanted to Know About Rectangular Legal Description and Perhaps a Tiny Bit More.

by Neil Shelton

Besides being all but a necessity of rural life, knowing how to decipher legal descriptions can lead you to fascinating insights on the history of your land.

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 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.

 Each Township and Range is further divided into 1-mile squares called Sections.  The most important thing to remember about this stage of the process is that the 36 sections are numbered and arranged BOTH left to right AND right to left, like this

Then once you get inside a Section, that's when things really get interesting, or complicated, depending on your point of view.

Each section can be divided into quarters and halves. So that a quarter-section is 160 acres and a quarter of a quarter is 40 acres.  In the figure above, the ten-acre square in the northwest corner is described as "The Northwest Quarter of the Northwest Quarter of the Northwest Quarter of Section 12 Township 29N, Range 8 West" which is abbreviated NW1/4NW1/4NW1/4 S12 T29N R9W or simply NW NW NW 12-29-9

Got that?  Okay, let's try it out.  Suppose I want to look up a  legal description that I've found in an old Warranty Deed:  Here it is

The easiest way to decipher any legal description is from the end backward. 

Like this:

In this case, we want to locate the property on a topo map, so we find the correct map by township and range and we locate Section 16 in Township 29 North, Range 2 East.  A typical Section is one mile square and contains 640 acres.

Next, we find the center of the section by drawing diagonals from each corner. Then you locate the Southeast Quarter of Section.16  A typical Quarter Section is half a mile square and contains 160 acres.

Using the same technique, we locate the Southwest Quarter of the Southeast Quarter of Section 16.  A typical Quarter-Quarter Section is quarter mile square and contains 40 acres. 

And finally, we locate the Northwest Quarter of the Southwest Quarter of the Southeast Quarter of Section 16, Township 29 North, Range 2 East.   A typical Quarter-Quarter-Quarter Section is 660 feet square and contains 10 acres.

You'll notice that I keep using the term "typical".  Not all sections are the same size, especially those on the north and west side of a Township block.  These are frequently contracted or expanded to make up for the curvature of the earth.  Here's an example,

This is in Texas County, Missouri.  The sections along the northernmost tier of T 29 N are all about a mile wide by around two and one half miles tall.  Here's how this is handled.

The southernmost Quarter Sections, the SW and the SE are of about normal size. the remaining two miles is divided up into eight "lots" of about 80 acres each or about a Half-Quarter Section.

Quite often, a property description will describe an otherwise square tract which is bounded on one or more sides by a road or stream.  In this case, a property that looks like this:

Will be described as "All that part of the West Half of the Southwest Quarter of Section 15 lying south of Coatney Branch and North of Highway 73..."

There are other systems of survey description most notably "Metes and bounds", which describes distances (metes) between different monuments (bounds).   While this method began with descriptions like, "Begin at the stone outcropping on the Elisha Wilson farm, thence proceed 15 rods north to a large hickory tree".  The original thirteen American colonies as well as Kentucky, Tennessee, parts of Ohio, Maine and Vermont were divided using this method.  Here's a modern example which makes reference to the Government Township and Range.:

Now I'd like to end up by saying something like, "and that's all there is to it".  Unfortunately, that's only the beginning, but this will get you started and you'll be able to talk to your county recorder without looking too silly.

You'll also need to be familiar with a few terms of measurement that I've included below:

Linear Measure

1 link
1 rod
1 chain
1 furlong
1 mile 7.92 inches
25 links or 16½ feet or 5½ yards
100 links or 4 rods or 66 feet
40 rods (660 feet)
8 furlongs or 320 rods or 80 chains or 5,280 feet

Square Measure

1 square rod
1 square chain
1 acre

1 square mile
1 township 272¼ square feet (30¼ square yards)
16 square rods
160 square rods or 10 square chains or 43,560 square feet or
208¾ feet square
640 acres (one section)
36 square miles

News and Commentary at Salon.com