Townsite Acts
There is an interesting article in American Surveyor about a case dealing with a lot boundary in a Townsite in Calaveras County. The case is Claudino v. Pereira (2008) 165 Cal.App.4th 1282.
The Townsite Acts of March 2, 1867 allowed for Towns of Squatters to get Title from the U.S. Government. My understanding of how it worked was the GLO would Patent the whole town to a local Judge then the County Surveyor would survey all of the occupation in the Town, make a Plat (looks a lot like a subdivision but it is definitely not one) and Field Notes for all of the Lots. Then the lot occupants could apply to the County Judge to get title. I’m not certain of all of the details but there were requirements that had to be met before the Judge could issue a Trustee’s Deed.
The key thing is Townsite Surveys were retracement surveys. The County Surveyor was not creating new boundaries as in the running of Section lines. The County Surveyor was following the fence, stone fence or gulch as shown to him by each occupant to be the boundaries of their lot.
Commonly the directions were given to the nearest quarter degree and the distances in chains and links. Often small lots have large misclosures. It is definitely not correct to just run out the bearings and distances because that could take you way off of the line.
I never heard of these things until about 8 years ago. My last employer owned a lot of land in Townsites so I had to get an education. At first I thought they were subdivisions but soon found out otherwise. There was a story of a State Park Surveyor who in 1970 started at a quarter section corner as called for in the Townsite Notes then ran bearing and distance all throughout the town upsetting almost everyone in the town (there is a lot of inholdings in the park). Eventually the executive management (not Land Surveyors) ordered him to pull all of his monuments after they had had a contentious meeting with the local residents. The Surveyor retired not long after that.
- 12 Replies
Townsite surveys are a subject dear to my heart, but I am not prepared at this late hour on Saturday night to discuss the subject competently. I would just say for now that I do not consider the surveys to be a retracment so much as an “as-built” if you know what I mean. Also, the County Surveyor, to my knowledge, was not necessarily the perpetrator.
Don
There was more than one townsite act and there are more than one flavor of townsite.
Some townsites were surveyed prior to any occupation. Page, Arizona (T41N, R9E) was surveyed by the Bureau of Reclamation per a 1958 act. It was approved by a commissioner and accepted by the BLM. It was monumented with brass tablets set in handholds and results published in the Arizona Coordinate System.
Other townsites are located within Indian Reservations and have nothing to do with squatters. Some townsites were not entirely patented and the unpatented lots remained ‘public land’.
It all depends.
Jerry
Ed Patton (BLM Cadastral Surveyor) told me he was working on retracing lots or parcels on an Indian Reservation in San Diego County (this was at least 3 years ago). The corners have marked stones which they were able to recover more than half of them if I recall what he said correctly. I don’t know any other details so it could be some other type of conveyances out of the government.
This is what makes working for a large landowning agency very interesting; there is a lot of variety in the types of things you encounter.
http://www.co.kern.ca.us/ess/govplattable32.asp
32-23-S12-M5.TIF
Example of a Townsite Survey done in 1924 and 1950.
As Jerry said, there’s more than one way to survey a Townsite.
This one looks more like a subdivision than what Dave is refering to I imagine.DJJ
Wow, uniform street widths.
The Town of Mendocino (redwood harvesting country) is more or less in a grid although the street right-of-ways are not quite parallel. Mendocino has Field Notes on the streets where in the Gold Country usually the streets are not described (they are what is left over). I should say this is based on the few I have seen such as Columbia (Tuolumne) and Latrobe (El Dorado).
The Gold Country townsites tend to be very non-uniform. Street widths vary quite a bit and the lots range from tiny to huge and everything in between with nothing square or rectangular. Small lots may have very large mis-closures.
“…in the Gold Country usually the streets are not described (they are what is left over). “
And there are darn few ties across them!
I have never come across a townsite like the one that plat depicts. I don’t understand it. Was the GLO in the subdivision business?
Don
> “…in the Gold Country usually the streets are not described (they are what is left over). “
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> And there are darn few ties across them!
>
> I have never come across a townsite like the one that plat depicts. I don’t understand it. Was the GLO in the subdivision business?
>
> DonI’m not sure of the history, but this is in oilfield country and was most likely done as part of, or to compliment/expidite oil exploration. the old National Petroleum Reserve No.1 (now Elk Hills) is to the north and east of Ford/Taft.
The field notes, assignment and special instructions would probably shed some light on the situation, but they’re not on line to the best of my knowledge.
The Gold Country, from what I’ve seen of it is a whole different animal from what’s down here.
DJJ
Check this one out (warning, 2.2mb .pdf):
Loyal
Goldfield Townsite
The Goldfield townsite looks like a fun one to work in!!! I always loved working in the mineral surveys because of the challenge.
I worked one job out near Goldfield in 1960 with the BLM. I don’t remember what we did, but I remember being there. It was just a one day job.
Jerry
Townsite surveys can be very interesting retracement surveys. The Town of Veteran WY was an established GLO townsite for the purpose of providing housing for U.S.B.R. irrigation projects and canals to develope farming. The Town of Veteran, which I retraced in 85 and the BLM retraced in 89(for some unknown reason), one street was platted at a distance differing from the found monuments for the townsite. It was one of those classic cases where I determined the original monuments found in the field were accepted and the street was wider than platted. It was reassuring that the BLM accepted my monuments and resurvey. The resurvey, plat and notes can be found @ http://www.wy.blm.gov/cadastral/products.htm. Click on Township Plats and Notes and T.23N. R.63W. in Goshen County. There was never any mention in the BLM retracement notes about the one street being wider than originally platted.
Pablo
I have the trial court decision and the filed briefs on this one.
The Townsite Act pertinent to Claudino was the one enacted by the CA legislature in 1868 (IIRC). It was enacted to remedy the title to occupied lots of towns that sprung up largely in mining areas, but other areas as well. Dave, your understanding is correct as to how the patents and transfers worked. The County Judge was issued the patent in a sort of Trust capacity. He would commission a survey of the townsite for the purposes of describing existing lots and then conveying them to the occupants.
The legislation specifically directs the surveyor to follow the occupation as it exists, or as it existed when the Judge got the patent. i can imagine that many of the occupation lines would start moving just before the surveyor came in, depending upon who wanted a larger lot and who was out of town at the time. Don’s description of the survey being an as-built of the occupation was a very good way to put it.
The entire old part of Placerville is one of these Townsites. Most of the descriptions misclose anywhere from a couple of feet to over 20′. I surveyed adjoining portions of a couple of the original lots a few years ago. On some portions, local surveyors had found and retraced portions of the old occupation lines and perpetuated them well. In other portions, I was fortunate to actually find occupation which had been in place in excess of 100 years and most likely followed the original lines. In one case, on a portion of line common to both lots, the original surveyor had neglected to call out a very obvious break in bearing, simply calling it, together with the next course of one of the lots as “East”.
The descriptions of those two lots misclosed by about 7′ and 15′, respectively. A surveyor now simply trying to establish these boundaries by relying on record bearings and distances would cause a multitude of expensive problems for the land owners as well as creating problems for himself.
Pereira’s surveyor didn’t quite do that. The core of the problem in that case is that one of the descriptions called the last course as being “thence northwesterly along a gulch to the point of beginning”, while the other was more general, describing the same line as “thence northwesterly to the point of beginning”.
Compounding the problem was that the plat showed a straight line for the disputed course. Knowing nothing else of this site, one might think that clears the ambiguity between the discrepant descriptions, but it doesn’t. It simply points the wrong way for those who don’t look just a little deeper. There were remnants of an old stone wall of the type commonly built along lot lines at the time the townsite was settled, and remnants of old fence, both roughly following or paralleling the flowline of a natural swale or gulch. Pereira’s surveyor had a difficult time deciding how to re-establish that line, at one time staking the straight line “northwesterly to the point of beginning”.
Remember that the Townsite Act required the surveyor to define the lots according to the existing occupation, so it controls if it can be relocated. Although the Townsite surveyor would have followed these stone walls where they existed, and they apparently still exist in many locations throughout this townsite, none of them are shown on the plat. So the fact that this particular one does not appear on the plat is immaterial. It existed, it marked the division between lots. Between a general description (nw’y to POB) and a more particular one (nw’ly along a gulch to POB), that indicating the more definite particulars is held over the general.
As I recall, Pereira’s surveyor eventually backed off calling the straight line the boundary and ended up filing a map showing all the various lines, one being the straight line, one following the flowline of the gulch as it currently exists, and another following the courses of the nearby rock wall/wire fence, but not identifying any particular one over the others as being the boundary.
One of the attorneys attempted, unsuccesfully, to separate the plat from the notes and argue that only the plat should control. The Townsite Act specifies that the plat and the notes were to be filed and that together, they make the complete document.
It is a very interesting case to delve into, and one that any CA surveyor, especially one working in the Sierra foothills should be well aware of.
The Townsite Plats I have seen are pretty sparse. They seem to be more of a diagram or sketch than a Plat. There often no dimensions so you have to get the Notes to be able to plot up a lot.
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