Survey Systems & Where the App Works

Metes and bounds is the oldest formal system of land description still in common use. Its origins trace to Roman land law and the land practices of medieval England, where fields and manors were described by walking the perimeter — measuring distances and identifying landmarks as you went. The word "metes" refers to measurements (distances), while "bounds" refers to boundaries identified by physical objects: trees, streams, roads, stone walls, and neighboring landowners.

English colonists brought this system to North America in the early 1600s, and it became the foundation of land recording in all thirteen original colonies. It spread into every state formed from those colonies and into states like Tennessee, Kentucky, West Virginia, Vermont, Maine, Hawaii, and Texas — states that developed their land systems before or outside the federal rectangular survey program. Today, roughly 20 U.S. states rely primarily on metes and bounds for property descriptions, alongside most of the English-speaking world.

A metes-and-bounds description begins at a defined starting point called the Point of Beginning (POB) — typically a corner monument such as an iron pin, a concrete marker, or a natural feature. From there, the description walks the perimeter of the property using a series of calls, each specifying a compass bearing and a distance. After the final call, the description should return exactly to the Point of Beginning, forming a closed polygon.

Bearings are expressed as angles measured from north or south toward east or west. For example, N42°30'15"E means "start facing North, rotate 42 degrees, 30 minutes, and 15 seconds toward the East." Distances are stated in feet, though older deeds frequently use chains (66 feet), rods (16.5 feet), or links (0.66 feet) — units from the Gunter's chain, the standard surveying instrument from the 1600s through the early 1900s.

The word "thence" separates one call from the next and is the key term the app uses to parse a description into individual legs. Each "thence" begins a new boundary segment. At the end of the description, phrases like "to the Point of Beginning," "back to the beginning," or "to the place of beginning" close the traverse.

Monument decay and movement. The most significant problem with old metes-and-bounds surveys is that they depend on physical monuments that may no longer exist or may have moved. Deeds from the 1800s frequently call for things like "a white oak, 18 inches in diameter" or "a pile of stones at the creek bank." Trees die. Stones are moved by plows, floods, and construction. Iron pins rust and shift. When the monument is gone, the corner location becomes a matter of interpretation, legal dispute, or professional resurvey.

Magnetic declination drift. Older surveys were conducted using a magnetic compass, and the bearings they recorded referenced magnetic north — not true geographic north. The problem is that magnetic north moves over time due to changes in the Earth's magnetic field. A bearing recorded as "N42°E" in 1840 in the eastern United States would have been influenced by a magnetic declination of roughly 3–4° West at the time. Today that same location has a declination closer to 5–6° West — a shift of 2–3 degrees over 180 years. On a 600-foot leg, that translates to 20+ feet of lateral error at the far end, compounding with every additional leg in the traverse.

Survey closures that don't close. Before precise instruments and GPS, surveying was done by hand under imperfect conditions — in rain, on steep slopes, through dense brush, often by surveyors of highly variable skill and integrity. Many historical deed descriptions have misclosures: the traverse does not return exactly to the Point of Beginning when the math is worked out. Some older descriptions close with errors of several feet; others have errors of dozens of feet or more. The app shows a closure error at the bottom of the plat detail — a large closure error is a signal that the deed text may have transcription errors or that the original survey was imprecise.

Ambiguous calls and boundary conflicts. Phrases like "along the fence line," "with the meanders of said creek," or "to the old road" can be nearly impossible to reconstruct precisely. Creek banks shift after floods. Fence lines are moved by landowners over generations. Roads are relocated or abandoned. Many boundary disputes in states using metes and bounds stem from descriptions that made perfect sense to the original surveyor standing on the ground in 1880 but are deeply ambiguous on paper today.

Unit inconsistencies and transcription errors. Deed descriptions were handwritten, then copied by courthouse clerks, then sometimes retyped from those copies. Each transcription introduced opportunities for error — a "4" misread as a "9," a decimal point in the wrong place, a bearing written as N42°E when the original said N24°E. If a parsed plat looks wrong, the first thing to check is whether the source deed text has any digits that look similar to each other, or whether chains may have been misread as feet.

By the time the United States gained independence in 1783, the problems with metes and bounds were already well understood. Boundary disputes between colonial landowners were common, descriptions were imprecise, and the chaotic patchwork of overlapping claims made western expansion administratively complicated. The Continental Congress responded with the Land Ordinance of 1785, which established an entirely new approach to surveying public land before it was sold or granted to settlers.

The system was largely designed by Thomas Jefferson, who advocated for a rational, grid-based approach that would divide the land into regular, repeating units that anyone could identify without needing to locate a specific monument. The first PLSS surveys began in what is now eastern Ohio in 1785 and expanded westward as the country grew. Over the following century, federal surveyors divided nearly a billion acres of western public land into a systematic rectangular grid that is still the foundation of land records in 30 U.S. states.

The PLSS organizes land around a series of principal meridians (north-south baselines) and corresponding base lines (east-west baselines). There are 37 principal meridians across the country, each serving as the origin point for the survey grid in its region. Examples include the Fifth Principal Meridian (covering Arkansas, Iowa, Missouri, and parts of Minnesota and North Dakota) and the Sixth Principal Meridian (covering Kansas, Nebraska, and parts of Colorado and Wyoming).

From each principal meridian, the land is divided into townships — squares measuring 6 miles on each side. Each township is identified by its position north or south of the base line (Township number) and east or west of the principal meridian (Range number). A township described as "Township 3 North, Range 2 East" is three townships north of the base line and two townships east of the principal meridian.

Each township is further divided into 36 sections, each one mile square and containing 640 acres. Sections are numbered 1 through 36 in a specific boustrophedon (back-and-forth) pattern starting in the northeast corner. A quarter section (160 acres) is identified as the NE¼, NW¼, SW¼, or SE¼ of a section. Quarter-quarters (40 acres) add another level of subdivision, producing descriptions like "the NW¼ of the SW¼ of Section 14, Township 3 North, Range 2 East."

GPS Stakeout lets you locate a PLSS section on the map and navigate to its corners using a BLM (Bureau of Land Management) lookup — without needing a deed description at all.

Variable survey quality. The federal government contracted PLSS surveys to private surveyors paid by the mile, working over enormous distances in remote terrain. Quality varied enormously. Some early surveys in the Midwest were carefully executed; others in the mountain West were rushed, falsified, or simply estimated across terrain that was difficult to physically traverse. The General Land Office (GLO) records for some areas contain corners that were "established" on paper but never physically set on the ground.

Earth curvature and convergence. Because the Earth is spherical, true north-south lines converge toward the poles. In a flat-earth grid, this would cause sections at the top of a township to be narrower than sections at the bottom. The PLSS addresses this with correction lines (also called guide meridians and standard parallels) set every 24 miles to reset the grid. In practice, this means that sections along the western and northern edges of townships are often undersized and irregular — these are called "fractional sections" and are identified in the records accordingly.

Lost and obliterated corners. PLSS corners were originally marked with wooden stakes, mounds of earth, pits, or bearing trees (witness trees with blazes carved into them). Many of these original monuments have been destroyed by farming, construction, fire, flooding, or simply the passage of time. When an original corner is lost, surveyors must use a process called proportionate measurement to re-establish it from surrounding corners — an approximation that can introduce small errors compared to where the original monument was actually set.

State boundaries mid-section. PLSS coverage does not always extend exactly to state or territory boundaries. Sections along borders are frequently irregular, and some areas were surveyed under multiple authorities using slightly different datums or measurement standards, creating small but real discontinuities in the grid.