Part III: Measured, Marked, and Recorded: Wilderness Becomes Real Estate
Contents
Partitioning the Public Domain: Emergence of the American Rectangular Land-Survey System
- Boundaries, Fluid and Fixed
- Boundary-Fixing, Two Ways
- By Landscape/Landuse-Relevant Metes-and-Bounds Surveys, or By Geometric, Cardinal-Direction Grid Surveys
- The Land Ordinance of 1785
- The Jefferson Committee Decrees Crosshatching of “the Western Lands” with a Prior-to-Sale, Compass-Aligned, Property-Line Framework
- Pre–Land-Ordinance Chronology of Events, 1780–85
- The Miracle Eightieth-of-a-Mile
- Edmund Gunter’s Hybrid-Numbered Chain Simplifies Acreage Computation
- A Square of Squares
- Square Townships, Each Enclosing 36 Mile-Square Sections, Organize the U.S. Public Domain
- Crossing the Wabash, 1805
- Surveyor William Rector Connects the Surveyors’ Points of Beginning for the Indiana and the Illinois Surveys
- Spring 1821, East-Central Illinois
- Mathematician-Surveyor John Messinger Leads a Corps of Deputy Surveyors and Crews in Springtime Surveys East of the 3rd Principal Meridian in Central Illinois
- Collision Zones
- True, or Nominal Only
- Aftermath
Marketing the Public Domain: Federal Land Office Sales Convert Government Land into Private Property
- Land Office Operations
- Land for Livelihood
- The Pioneer Family Farm
- Portion of a Page from a Danville Land Office Receiver’s Chronologically Ordered Ledger Book
- Land as Capital
- Speculation Mania, Large-Scale Investments, 1835-36-37
- Index
