mloser

I recently got and read a book called "Murder in the Catskills" by Norman J Van Valkenburgh. It is about a surveyor in the Catskill area who finds a skeleton and helps determine who the murderer was. While the relationship to benchmarking is tenuous, there is a history of surveying in the Catskills and references to surveys done and corner monuments. It is a bit amateurish but is still a good read, especially if you have a strong interest in the Catskill area. Now that I have finished it I thought someone here might be interested and I will be happy to pass it along. Like all things free there is a catch, actually the choice of a two part catch--I would like the book to go to someone who has historic ties or interest in the Catskills, or barring that, someone who will pass it along when he/she is done, preferably by posting here so another benchmarker can read it. If you are interested send me a message. Please don't post here to request the book--I don't want to clutter up the forum with that sort of thing. Matt

It looks like some survey party may have set a nail into the stem hole with some sort of compound to use as a center point.

I found a similar monument, SUSQUEHANNOCK, in Pennsylvania a few years ago. I didn't get a good enough picture of the top plate and I can't see any noticeable holes to mount an instrument. I am still curious about the deep grooves in the plate. Two run corner to corner but there are others that seem random. The one to the left might be a backsight line to the azi. I guess I could revisit it and get some angles. The walk up is pretty nice! I assume its permanence had/has something to do with the Safe Harbor Dam.

I would say it means the person submitting the recovery didn't know what he was doing. You are correct in your assessment that the finial IS the mark. There is nothing else to recover and access to the lighthouse is not necessary. If you are confident that the finial is where it originally was when the mark was used then you have found it. That being said, the NGS is not interested in recoveries of intersection stations (which this is) so there is no real reason to report it to them. I might consider it to fix the incorrect previous report though. Claiming it as found on GC.com is fine though.

After looking at the topo for the area I am pretty sure it is the road that moved. Chestnut Rd used to run north of the tracks and then angle southeast across them. At some point it was straightened out to become the landing road for the I-90 exit. If you follow the imaginary path on the topo map you can picture the road going just to the right of the BM X, exactly where the description put it in 1959.

A couple of things I didn't put in my earlier post. The document I looked up on Google Books was supposedly published in 1898, and was only a snippet view, so I had to use the search function to view the entire Belgrade bolt data. You can get to the book by searching "belgrade bank bolt" in Google Books search, and then under "Search in this book" enter "Belgrade". The bottom snippet shows the text of the description of the bolt. It references "Note 4" and a search of that turns up the END of the description of what kind of mark it is, and nothing I have done so far (such as search for "note 3" and hope that note 4 would appear below it) has allowed me to see all the note 4 text--it cuts off the top, and most important line. I suspect Papa-Bear may be right in saying it is a bolt with a cross on it and the letters U S B M chiseled around it (see his post above). A full view book I located is Hypsometry: vertical leveling in the United States 1903-1907. It doesn't have Belgrade in it but does have notes on benchmark types. They are not the same as in the Belgrade description but reading through them you can get some idea of how a bolt mark might have been set. I suspect Note 10 might be what was set on the bank building. While at first it might seem this book predates the Belgrade Bank mentioned in the 1958 recovery, other things in the book mention dates as late as 1907 and 1910, so that may not be the case. I haven't been able to search for anything on the title page to get a good look at the real publication date. Google Books are notoriously poorly described, with the title, publisher, and publication date often being incorrect. So I take the 1898 date with a grain of salt. Also, I think Paul has the wrong Belgrade and you seem to have noticed that (with your sneaky reference to not being able to see it from the grain elevator--NOW I get it!). That bank is in Missouri. I couldn't find any solid references to a Belgrade State Bank, or even one at that location by another name (I admit it wasn't an exhaustive search though). My opinion of "one block north and one block west" of the old train station (see QX0207 for its location) is north to Main St, then west to Broadway, which is just where you have been looking, and just where the QX0208 coords place the mark. In fact, on Google Earth, they appear to be right on the mark--at the west corner of the building that lies in an open area with trees. Wait until it gets to be a balmy 20 or so and head back to the bank. If they sandblasted it they may have removed the USBM notation, but it could still be there. I have a flashlight in my pack that I use to shine at an angle when looking for notations like this. When done in low light it is sometimes possible to highlight the letters enough to make them out. But the bolt, or some evidence of it, should be pretty noticeable. That should be your key. Matt

I can handle the height above the ground, but the roads would intersect SOUTH of the tracks. That mystifies me and doesn't make sense.

I can add one more piece and it won't help directly. I found a snippet of one of the USCG&S's Special Pubs on Google Book search and here is what it says: 1 block west of the Northern Pacific Railway depot; at the northeast corner of Davis Street and Northern Pacific Avenue, 94 meters north of the railway track, in the vertical surface of the foundation of the building occupied by the Belgrade State Bank, 0.5 meter east of the southwest corner, 0.5 meter above the sidewalk, a copper bolt lettered U.S.B.M. This doesn't correspond to much in the current datasheet, and to me makes things even more muddied. There IS a Davis Street but it no longer intersects with Northern Pacific Avenue. NP Avenue is SOUTH of the tracks, and the mark is 94 feet NORTH. It is hard to believe that both NP Avenue and Davis Street have been MOVED in the last 100 years. And I agree with Papa-Bear that your 1/4" bolt is not the mark. He has seen a lot of bolts in buildings (in NYC) and I have seen a few also. All have been much larger than 1/4"--like he said--mostly 1/2" or 3/4". Note that the 1898 description has the bolt actually STAMPED "U.S.G.S". This is not unheard of-- I have seen it a few times. Like Paul said your best bet may be local research--finding what building the bank was in when the mark was set and recovered successfully will help tremendously and can even be done in the winter. Matt

Paul, I saw that too and I think it is for QX0468 that is on a pier of I-90. There is a sloppy hand drawn arrow pointing southeast from the BM 4753. I think I can see the X under the eastbound lane of I-90. If you look to the southeast there is another notation for a benchmark--BM 4769 with an obvious bent arrow drawn to the west (although it doesn't seem to point to a current NGS mark, it looks like the X is along a building and nearby QX0225 is on a building--the station).

Back to your original question though... I used Foxtrot's great Google Earth benchmark tools and went up the line about three miles and discovered a mark there that said it was on bridge 146 also. If memory serves it was a 1957 mark and the one you were looking for was set in 1982. It seems the NGS came along in 1982 and, when they couldn't find a mark, or perhaps if the existing mark was difficult to access, they set new ones. While it is possible that the railroad changed their mile numbering it seems unlikely that it would have changed by three miles. Usually the numbering is from some main terminal point. In my area Norfolk Southern has renumbered a lot of trackage, but the differences are much greater than 3--for instance old PRR MP 105 is now NS MP 292. This reflects the mileage to Norfolk (I think) rather than Philadelphia (I am sure). In all cases that I have seen with renumbered MPs the original MP location has been kept and just renumbered, so the railroad obviously didn't take partial miles into account (maybe MP 292 is actually 292.5 miles from Norfolk!). Although I would look on bridge 146 up the road a ways, I would make the assumption that 146 on this datasheet means 143.

PB, I remember those "Lazarus" discussions and in fact have submitted KW2650 as a Lazarus station. I went to the trouble of downloading the entire non-pub list and processing it so I could see it in Google Earth, then loaded them to my GPSr. I am so hard up for local stations I have started looking for ones that basically don't exist! I found KW2650 easily because it is an existing USGS station and I had the USGS description. I am waiting for it to magically un-destroy. My concern with WILLOW GROVE is that there is useful information in the 1978 setting information that should be part of the NGS record, and if we can find that I can use it as part of my recovery, or even return to the station and take better measurements, then submit a recovery. I also wanted Deb to be aware of the situation--she may remove the destroyed status just based on the 2005 recovery text. George, Thanks for chiming in! It looks like the mark was legit, even though some of the historic documentation seemed to say differently. I wonder what happened to the cone! Hopefully NJGS will come through with the 1978 information and we can make a better datasheet from it.

Papa-Bear, I totally agree that the mark's history is unique. It seems there was no permanent surface mark set in 1839, just an underground cone and a signal pole, or maybe NO underground mark and JUST a signal pole, judging by the 1869 recovery. Then, as you note, no sign was found in 1946, and it magically reappears in 1983, having been set in 1978 but with no distances to the reference marks, and RM 3 not found due to lack of description. The 1984 recovery party found RM3, but was not nice enough to describe it! It brings doubt to the whole station in many ways. Still, it is a very usable mark, unlike so many we find on the tops of mountains, which seem to be only for our own hobby interest any more. WILLOW GROVE sits in an open soccer field, and though it has some tree and house interference to the north and west, it may be a decent GPS station. It is certainly very accessible. I would like to see it back in the database. I have emailed Dave asking if he knows anything about the reference mark as well as the destroyed status. I am fairly certain that the destroyed status was an error--there is a recovery in 2005 that says, simply, "RM1 ONLY" and I believe that somehow translated to a full destroyed status. I have also emailed Deb with that information. Once I hear back from them I will submit a new recovery. I spent well over an hour at that mark measuring distances to various objects, including the two reference marks (and it wasn't easy to measure to RM2, since it was a distance of 136 feet or so and I only have a 100 foot tape, plus I had to measure THROUGH a chain link fence. I would never submit that measurement as definitive!). Add the rain, wind, and an umbrella to the mix and I was a sorry looking puppy at the end of my time there.

Last Sunday, on a rainy, windy afternoon, I located KV3662 WILLOW GROVE 1839. It wasn't an exciting recovery by any means. The original mark was replaced with a disk in 1978, so there is no physical history left at the station. It has also been found fairly recently, one reason I had not hurried to get to it. The mystery surrounding this station is finding RM 3. There is no description and a 30 minute search turned up nothing. I emailed DaveD to see if he had any documentation about it so I may have to return if he does.

I stopped letting GC.com recoveries bother me a long time ago. For the most part I consider them casual remarks, and rarely do I bother to post a note or contact the incorrect recoverer. I can only recall one time I contacted a person to correct his recovery and I only did it because it seemed he was getting somewhat serious about benchmark recovery. In that case he was happy to hear from me and to get a bit of information about what he didn't find. Like Foxtrot, I NEVER look at the GC.com site before I go out hunting. For me it really isn't the recovery itself, but the hunt AND recovery. I prefer to head in using only the NGS datasheet and have referred to the GC.com recovery only a few times when I failed in my search--one time I was impressed with the intuition and/or persistence of the previous benchmarker, and once I was embarrassed that I hadn't spotted the mark without help.

Papa, I TOTALLY agree, especially in this instance since the marks are special. I am pretty sure YARD is destroyed--I have looked at it on aerial photos and the water tank described on the datasheet is huge and sits squarely on the spot the mark occupied. I have also driven by the area, but haven't approached the mark yet--it is surrounded by houses and a fence, so there is no easy access other than asking someone if I can cut through their yard (which I am willing to do, but haven't yet had the opportunity). I need to drive to WILLOW GROVE though and take a look to see what is up there. Hopefully the weekend after Thanksgiving will give me the chance when I take my daughter back to college in Phila.

I might as well do PA. I think I can get to BETHEL 1839 on Thanksgiving weekend. I had not bothered with it to date because it has been found recently. Two others (YARD and WILLOW GROVE) have been officially destroyed, but I will try to see what WILLOW GROVE has to offer, since RM1 seems to remain. I will also try to get to Newtown at some point.

I have had a few USGS or NGS not founds that I have subsequently found. Probably the best example is KW0765. Sometimes I think our modern equipment--GPSr and metal detector especially, help us find marks that would have been impossible to find years ago--we can get very close to the mark location when reference points have disappeared, and then we can magically search a large area for an underground mark. I am of the opinion however, that quite a few of the newer NGS not founds are actually USPS recoveries where the agency was entered as NGS. I have seen some notations of "this report was submitted by the US Power Squadron), or something similar, on a number of NGS recoveries, especially in the 1980s and later. Thus, an NGS not found may actually be a USPS not found.

Care to share why?

I have run across a few named after the landowner, and was pleasantly surprised to have Mr Trump . My favorite local name is OYES, named, I think, in opposite reference to the nearby town of Ono and its (now defunct and gone) O'Yes Restaurant. Perhaps the survey team ate there while they occupied the mark and, since there was already and ONO mark, named this one OYES as a humorous sidebar.

I have to throw in with Ernmark and Z15. Giving them something to read will be too complex and time consuming. I just tell them what I am looking for and only go into any sort of detail if they ask or seem confused. Most don't know what I am looking for. If they do they are usually quick to point it out or tell me how to get to it. If they don't they look puzzled and say "go ahead". Rarely, they are interested in what I want to find. Even more rarely, they come along or offer to help. Recently I had the offer to use a person's ATV to get to the top of the mountain behind his house to get to Topton (I turned it down, primarily because I have never ridden one and didn't want to get injured by getting into a dangerous situation on it, plus I simply need the exercise. It turned out I never would have survived the trip on an ATV--the terrain was too steep and rocky to ride without experience).

It is "1800s", not "1800's". The proliferation of acronyms we use today has resulted in people being uncertain about how to pluralize them, and they seem to feel more comfortable adding a separator before the "s" (PC's, TV's, et al). Dates do not require an apostrophe, but when you are tempted to add an apostrophe to any other acronym or word, ask if it owns anything in the sentence. "The TVs in our house are all high def.", and "The TV's volume button was not working."

I am almost done hunting the quads I got from the USGS and am about ready to report on the marks. Since the marks have no unique identifiers such as a PID I fretted over how to report them for quite a while but settled on following the original format: The top half is the USGS quad list, with my notes on it (Good luck reading them. My handwriting is so poor that if I don't interpret them within a couple days I will not be able to read it myself!). The bottom half is my recovery list, done with Open Office but saved as a Word doc. I kept the same order as the USGS list and for each mark I typed in some identifying text to parallel the original list, then added recovery information, descriptive text if needed and the coordinates for the mark. I have a few more to find to finish each list and then I will submit them.

I wouldn't report it, at least not yet. I see Andilphoto's point about it not being the station, which is technically true, but if I was certain I had found the station "reference stone" (set on top of the underground station) I would report it as found. This description is typical of 1880 era tri-stations that describe the underground mark as being the station (a beer bottle, a croc, a flat stone with a drill hole, etc.--see BARRY 1885 for an example) and then refer to the surface mark, which is meant to be used as the actual geodetic control point. As with more modern stations, the underground mark exists as a means of recreating the station if it should get damaged or destroyed. The reason I wouldn't report it is that I am not certain it is the station. It is indeed a suspiciously "station-looking" rock, but it is in such poor shape that I can't see any markings. What you are most likely looking for is a squared off stone that is approximately 6" x 6" x 4' (it could be larger--up to 12" x 12"), and has some sort of markings on the top and possibly the side. The top marking would most likely be a cross, either from corner to corner or from edge to edge. On the side would be USLS or US, or something (or maybe nothing). Finding and measuring to 2 or 3 reference stones would make me much more confident that I had found the actual stone. The reference mark disks are most likely 6" x 6"--I looked around GC.com for similar marks and found a description of the reference disks as being that size. Based on what you have located I think you found the stone. If you feel confident that it is you may want to submit a Found, Poor recovery, since there are no cross-marks on the stone top any more. The existence of a reset disk nearby rules out any real use of this mark anyway--you will be reporting it for historical purposes anyway!

The one I linked to above said the "highest point of the rail".

Old school! That means that the bearing is North, then head 34 degrees 02 minutes west. You can do this on site with a compass (it is how I have done it the couple of times I have run across it) or calculate it by subtracting 34 degrees from 360--your mark is at 326. I am not sure if that is magnetic or true north but suspect true north. Of course, since it is 300 feet away... Whoo--good luck on that one. All of my bearing reference marks were close and were reference holes in nearby rocks so finding them wasn't too difficult.