[time-nuts] Obscure terms

Hal Murray hmurray at megapathdsl.net
Thu Aug 20 23:13:34 UTC 2009


> Can I ask you US dudes a question?
> Do you know, without looking it up, what an acre is?

I had to think a couple of seconds, but I came up with 640.

A lot of the western US was surveyed so they would have something to put in 
deeds.  A township is 6 by 6 miles divided up into 36 sections a mile on a 
side.  The section boundaries appear on our topo maps where a sensible system 
would have a sq-km grid.

The lines on the maps are often quite non-square.  They are leftover from 
where the early surveyors actually put the markers rather than what they 
should have done.
  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Section_(land)
It's common to find survey markers on trees while hiking.  They are yellow 
(easy to spot) with a 6x6 grid on them and a nail at the you-are-here point 
which is usually where the trail crosses one of the lines.

When the pioneers moved west, they got land surveyed by that system.  (A lot 
of it was given away if you settled in and stayed there for N years.)  
Children's stories of farmers often refer to things like "the back 40" so the 
40 sticks in my head.   That was a quarter of a quarter of a square mile.  
I'm not sure how I remember that.  It's the part I had to think about.

I think the land grants were often 1/4 square mile and chopped up into 4 
chunks for the convenience of the farmer.
  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Homestead_Act
It's a big part of our culture, right next to cowboys and indians and fur 
trappers.




-- 
These are my opinions, not necessarily my employer's.  I hate spam.






More information about the time-nuts mailing list