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Besides being all but a necessity of rural life, knowing how to decipher legal descriptions can lead you to fascinating insights on the history of your land. |
Planning the Homestead Orchard Plant the wrong trees, or plant in the wrong place, and it may be a 10-year mistake that you may never get to make right. The Homestead Cookbook A searchable online cookbook loaded with homesteader's recipes and growing every day. Clearing Land for Pasture Meadow Creation 101 The Simplest House of All The first house should provide all the bare necessities, but few frills. |
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How to Read Land Descriptions ~or~ Everything You Always Wanted to Know About Rectangular Legal Description and Perhaps a Tiny Bit More. by Neil Shelton If you’ve ever wondered over the deed to your homestead or the strange designations you’ve seen in your real estate tax bill, you’ve come face to face with a legal description. Ever since man started slicing up the earth and deciding which pieces of it belonged to whom, there has been a need for defining exactly where any given piece of land might lay. In early Britain, this was handled in a memorable fashion: the policy was to take a young child from the neighborhood, lead him one by one, to the corners of the tract of land in question, then give him a severe thrashing at each location. The theory was that the child would long remember each spot (if beaten with sufficient gusto) and could testify to it’s location long into the future. Today’s coddled children have it easy: we just record a survey at the county recorder’s office, but when we walk around the perimeter of a property, we still call it, “beating the bounds”. That’s how the phrase originated. In most of the United States, rural land is described according to what is referred to as Government or Rectangle Survey or much less frequently, the Aliquot system. It's used in thirty of the most rural states, including Alaska, but excluding Texas. Here's how that works: First of all, a series of base-marks has been established for all of the continental U.S. Lines running north to south are referred to as "meridians" and east-west lines are called "base-lines". Here's a map showing all the meridians and baselines.
You'll notice that the Meridians converge as they go north. That, of course, is because of the curvature of the earth. Most of the effort involved in this sort of land description relates to different ways to describe squared boundaries on a spherical globe. It's like trying to put a postage stamp on an orange, you've got to figure out ways to iron out the wrinkles.
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