Nature Rambles | Lines of our landscape laid out long ago

MIKE MILLER

In the chilly wintertime of 1819, a crew of surveyors was crisscrossing the hills along the bluffs of the Illinois River. They were component of the General Land Office’s new initiative to deploy a square-grid geographic identification procedure. This method included surveyors producing 1-mile squares, called “Sections” all across the state. A team of 36 sections would collectively make up a “Township.” In all, surveyors laid out close to 60,000 sections and documented the spots of each and every of these portion corners. This system started out in 1804 and took surveyors until finally 1843 to end surveying the point out.

If you have walked any of the trails in our woodland parks about central Illinois, you will recognize how strolling a straight line is instead tricky. Steep hills, deep creeks and ravines, and dense vegetation make wandering cross-nation a hard proposition. Incorporate to this the issues of trying to keep on a correct compass bearing, while measuring length with a 66-foot iron chain built up of 100 backlinks. To be able to do this with any diploma of accuracy, these surveyors have been extremely competent. Now, we even now use these traces that they laid out much more than 200 a long time in the past.

The bodily hardships the surveyors had to endure, 12 months-spherical in the wilderness, would have been enormous. Masking close to 20 miles each and every working day on foot, sleeping in tents, owning to regroup, go camp and all of your provides on a standard foundation. By means of cold, rain, warmth, and terrain that would make a modern-day mail-carrier cringe, it couldn’t have been an effortless daily life. On the other hand, they experienced a front-row seat at the exploration of a landscape just before it was altered by modern advancement. Nowadays, considerably less that 1{6d6906d986cb38e604952ede6d65f3d49470e23f1a526661621333fa74363c48} of Illinois appears to be like like it did when the surveyors walked their part traces. Their effectiveness at surveying produced it probable for land to be bought, and eventually altered by the new entrepreneurs.

Further than laying out the section traces, the surveyors ended up also liable for documenting what style of place they had been going for walks through. They experienced a checklist of small-hand descriptions for land. Whilst they surveyed a line, they would recognize anytime the vegetation modified along that line. For instance, when they left a forest and entered a prairie, they would recognize at what place along their measurements that this occurred. When they came to a corner of a portion, and had been in a woodland, they would acquire measurements to the closest trees from that stage and observe the compass headings of people trees, and establish the species. This allowed the segment corner to be “triangulated” by upcoming surveyors. If they have been in a prairie and there have been no trees, they would construct a rock carne, if rocks have been offered, or established a wood stake on a filth mound. They would also note no matter whether an region was suitable for cultivation, or if there was plentiful timber suitable for harvest.

It is these notes about habitats, tree species, and other typical observations that interests ecologists right now. Whilst the GLO Survey was built to aid the sale and progress of land, it also developed a blueprint of what the condition of Illinois was like 200 yrs in the past. Maps would afterwards be created from these subject notes that display us the extent of forests and prairies throughout the state, what kinds of wetlands existed, and what species of trees were being popular and how significantly aside they grew in our woodlands. It is a glance again at an Illinois before 99+ percent was altered by human action. In several approaches it has come to be a blueprint for the restoration of these habitats as effectively.

I just lately looked back at a segment line that was surveyed on January 30, 1819. It is a segment corner that lies along the boundary of the Peoria Park District’s Singing Woods Character Protect. In the field notes, the surveyors write “Set a write-up at the corner of segment 8, 9, 16 & 17. From a White Oak 12in diameter bearing N50˚W, 24 back links, and White Oak 15in diameter, S55˚E, 14 inbound links. Land quite hilly, weak soil unfit for cultivation, timber oak and hickory, no undergrowth.”

That same corner nowadays is now underneath a tall powerline, and none of the original witness trees nevertheless stand. On the other hand, the study crew also observed that as they had been walking south together that exact same segment line, approaching the corner, that they arrived across an 11-inch diameter White Oak, specifically on the study line, at 71.5 chains. That oak is still there. Nowadays, it is 32 inches in diameter. A tree that, in its youth, was noticed by a surveyor on a cold wintertime day. If only that tree could talk. Feel of the tales it could explain to!

This White Oak in Singing Woods Character Protect was a young tree mentioned by General public Land Surveyors together a area line they have been surveying in 1819. Files from the Normal Land Office’s initiative claimed the Oak was 11 inches in diameter. It is now 32. (MIKE MILLER)