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Today we have a strong sense of what private property is and what it means to be the owner of land but such thinking was not always the case. The idea of land as private property can be dated to 1538, in England, when Sir Richard Benese wrote a book describing how to calculate the area of a given piece of property. This was the year, not coincidentally, that King Henry VIII dissolved almost four hundred monasteries and put the land (almost half a million acres) up for sale. It was suddenly very important to know just how much one land owned. One could exchange land for cash, make the land produce rent for oneself, or compare one's total holdings in acreage to those of another land owner. The medieval system of land scattered in workable parcels for the use of supporting many people turned into the more modern practice of using land to generate money. This urgent need for accurate land measurements required new techniques of surveying. Edmund Gunter, born in 1581 to a Welsh family, would devise a surveyor's chain in about 1607 that would quickly become the acceptable means of measuring land. Gunter's chain was an unvarying length (precisely one hundred links, or twenty-two yards). Supply and demand now would determine the price of a parcel of land. Land was now a commodity in England. It was an age of measurement. Land was not the only item to be measured. Accurate navigation required accurate measurements of latitude and, eventually, longitude. Science needed accurate measurement and experimentation for reproducible results and, thus, confirmation by others. Dances were composed of tightly paced measures. Measurement meant knowledge, and knowledge meant power. Gunter's chain crossed the Atlantic Ocean to find use in America. Settlers moving away from the narrow strip of English-settled land along the eastern coastline found good, "free" land farther inland. Much of this land was already owned either by Native Americans or by wealthy men such as Lord Fairfax, who boasted a five-million-acre estate in northern Virginia. Fairfax found his land infested with squatters, however, and brought the power of Gunter's chain to clearly lay out his claim to his land. By the mid-eighteenth century, good surveyors could command an income equal to that of a lawyer. This land-hungry frenzy was satisfied somewhat differently in different parts of America, and was different from other groups' views of property ownership. In Virginia, settlers chose their piece of land and then had it surveyed and registered. Headrights were granted to those who paid for their own passage across the Atlantic, or who paid for the passage of others. Metes and bounds--that is, using natural landmarks such as rocks, trees, and streams to determine property boundaries--was common in the South. In New England, the emphasis was on communities rather than individuals so townships were laid out before settlers moved in. Gunter's chain was used in the Midwest, at Thomas Jefferson's request to have orderly grids for yeomen farmers. The Spanish, French, and Native Americans settled their lands differently from those people of English descent. The Spanish king sponsored exploration and settlement in Mexico and north along the Pacific coast. Spaniards obtained land as part of this general pattern and laid out their towns according to the Law of the Indies, which had been enacted in 1573. In French-owned North American territory, the Crown owned the land and determined who settled there and who had monopolies on the fur and timber. Native Americans understood that a particular people "owned" the land only so long as they belonged to the place. Communal rights to the land came from occupation, long usage, or family burial; individuals did not have land rights. By the eighteenth century, Anglo-Americans had taken the idea of land ownership and land as a commodity far beyond English perceptions of the time. In America, land speculation ran rampant. The Proclamation Line, instituted by King George III in 1763 would put a damper on colonial expansion across the Appalachians but this would be lifted when American independence from England was gained. (The English ceded its western lands, as far as the Mississippi River, to the Americans in the Treaty of Paris in 1783.) Jefferson pushed for organized settlement over the mountains. He believed that land ownership guaranteed the individual independence and would generate an interest in the building of law-abiding communities. And, he did not want the land speculators to benefit. Also, the national government had debts totaling about $40,000,000.00, which only the sale of land could make an appreciably decrease. Jefferson was appointed committee chairman to choose the best way to survey and sell the land of the new states to be laid out in the territory between the Appalachians and the Mississippi. The land survey used in the Midwest, as refined by Jared Mansfield, surveyor-general of the United States, made buying simplicity itself, whether by squatter, settler, or speculator. The survey made the unique identification of each section possible. Beginning with a Principal Meridian, ranges and townships were numbered, and plats labeled. The system was so straightforward that anyone could understand it as easily as could a government surveyor. Measurement and mapping turned the wild land into tamed property. And, the survey made possession legal. Midwestern and Western cities would grow up following these grids. Early attempts to use some other town shape would frequently result in modification to the familiar square grid in a relatively short span of time, so ingrained had this pattern become in the American psyche. It would not be until the early twentieth century that suburban planners would follow Frederick law Olmsted's advice to create curving streets and generous green spaces. When nineteenth-century conservation-minded individuals such as John Muir and John Burroughs urged gentler use of the land and the setting aside of some areas for public use (park land), they met with strong opposition. Private land ownership had a long history in America and property was still equated with power. Opinions would change with the passage of time, as we can see in the fruition of actions taken by conservationists and preservationists that resulted in such parks as Yosemite and Yellowstone, among many others. Yet, it remains unique to the United States that property has such heavy overtones of independence, power, and commodity. Where else but here would the purchase of the French-held Louisiana Territory in 1803 not seem like the sale of an empire but, rather, simply a land deal?
For other stories about measuring America see any of the following:
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