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A Location Guide To The General Land Office (GLO) Survey Plats |
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"The surveyors, as they are respectively qualified, shall proceed to divide said territory into townships of 6 miles square, by lines running due north and south, and others crossing these at right angles, as near as may be, unless where the boundaries of the late Indian purchases may render the same impracticable, and then they shall depart from this rule no further than such particular circumstances may require...As soon as 7 ranges of townships and fractional parts of townships, in the direction from south to north, shall have been surveyed, the geographer shall transmit plats thereof to the board of treasury, who shall record the same, with the report in well bound books to be kept for that purpose." With the Land Ordinance of 1785, the need for an organization to carry out the newly created mandates became vital. A vast amount of land had to be surveyed, maps drawn, meticulous records kept, along with a considerable degree of oversight. So in 1812, Congress, with the Act of April 25, 2 Stat. 716, created the General Land Office (GLO) and placed it under the jurisdiction of the Treasury Department. A couple of weeks later, President Madison appointed Edward Tiffin as the first commissioner. He was able to organize a structure, pull the immense number of land records together, and begin the Herculean operation of surveying newly-acquired territories, the Louisiana Purchase in particular. Along with a new organization, a new method of surveying was employed. Previously, land had been surveyed using a system called metes and bounds, in which surveyors start at a fixed point, usually determined by a local natural or artificial monument, and ran lines by compass course and distance. But the Land Ordinance of 1785 also mandated that surveyors use the new (at that time) rectangular system whereby the land was partitioned into township and range, with 36 parcels per township, each 1 square mile or 640 acres.Each township itself is 6 miles square and based on a series of principal meridians and baselines running across the land. There are only thirty states, known as the Public Land states, which were surveyed using the rectangular system. The original thirteen colonies and their then territories(the states of Kentucky, Maine, Tennessee, Vermont, Virginia, West Virginia) plus Hawaii and Texas* were surveyed with metes and bounds or other methods. The original plat maps drawn by GLO geographers have become very valuable resources to a wide range of scholars and professionals from archaeologists and historians to engineers and surveyors. Initially three copies were struck: one for the surveyor general; one for the GLO office in Washington; and one for local land offices. More recently these plats have been committed to microfilm, microfiche, and electronic formats such as CD-ROM and web-based documents. While this sounds like many copies abound and access is abundant, in actuality these plats can be very hard to find as they are held by a wide-range of organizations---governmental bodies, libraries, archives, and historical societies. Nor do they have a title proper, so many times they fall under different categories within an organization such as manuscript collections, map collections, or microfilm collections. The purpose of this guide is to list all the organizations who own these plats whether they be originals or copies, the formats they will be found in, the respective organization's contact information such as address, phone #, e-mail address, price of copying, etc. This information was put together through e-mail and phone-call contact as opposed to personally visiting each location. Hence some errors are possible. Please report any errors or omissions to: Multi-State Resources Bureau of Land Management Owns: copies (microfilm) This office owns the plats for Alabama, Alaska, Arizona, Arkansas, California,Colorado, Florida, Idaho, Kansas, Louisiana, Michigan, Minnesota, Mississippi, Montana,Nebraska, Nevada, New Mexico, North and South Dakota, Oklahoma, Oregon, Utah, Washington,Wisconsin, Wyoming, & some Texas. National Archives & Records Administration Owns: originals & copies (microfilm) This office owns plats for Alabama, Illinois, Indiana, Iowa, Kansas, Mississippi,Missouri, Wisconsin, parts of Ohio, Oklahoma, Oregon, & Washington State Resources | |
Some of Texas was surveyed using the rectangular system. In order to access these plats contact the following: | |
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