m&h

Thanks to bicknell & Black Dog Trackers for clarification on the reporting aspect of the topic, and huge congrats to Me & Bucky for the find and the terrific photos. Inspiring. We wish there were a ceramic detector! Cheers,

We’re still rank beginners, but we’re finding stations that haven’t been recovered for a while. Today’s main boost was measuring accurately to a point, digging gently down to the top of a reference mark .75’ below ground level, then putting the dirt back so it looked as it had before we came. We’re going slowly through the datasheets for Nantucket, and putting aside some that seem beyond our skills for the time being, maybe forever. In the process, we’ve noticed something we don’t understand. Between about 1845 and 1910, several marks were established somewhat vaguely, by modern standards. Inverted bottles or “stone cones” buried 3 feet deep, maybe three hundred yards from a brushpile, a cow, or something marginally more stable—a shoreline, say. Later recovery attempts, even those carried out by USCGS in the 1930s, 1940s, and 1950s, have been unsuccessful. Their notes seem pretty unequivocal: “THE PUBLISHED DESCRIPTION IS INADEQUATE FOR AN ECONOMICAL RECOVERY. IT IS RECOMMENDED THAT THE STATION BE CONSIDERED LOST.” (1949) “AT THIS TIME IT IS IMPOSSIBLE TO ASCERTAIN WHAT THE STATION WAS OR HOW IT MAY HAVE BEEN MARKED. IT IS RECOMMENDED THAT THIS STATION BE CONSIDERED LOST.” (1949) “STATION HAS BEEN DESTROYED.” (1932) “STATION NOT RECOVERED. ORIGINAL DESCRIPTION INADEQUATE FOR PRESENT-DAY RECOVERY. BELIEVE THIS STATION IS LOST FOREVER.” (1955). We know there are benchmark hunters who find such notes challenging, and we understand and sympathize, though we don’t think we’ve had enough practice to do more than that. What we haven’t figured out is why anyone would come along fifty or eighty years behind such reports and say nothing more than “MARK NOT FOUND.” Often the reporting agency is something called U.S. Power Squadron; we haven’t yet Googled it. If there have been three or four unsuccessful attempts to recover a mark since 1845, is there any value in our telling anyone we couldn’t find it either?

Many thanks for that fine, informative response. I was wondering about the criteria for inclusion and exclusion. m&h

Begging your pardon. PID #AJ4075, referred to above, is in the NGS database but not in this one. We're sorry to have forgotten that when we posted the question. m&h

We’ve looked around the forums pretty thoroughly, but haven’t yet found an answer to this exact question: Why is there no PID for a disk that is clearly marked “U.S. Coast & Geodetic Survey and State Survey Station”? In other words, not a mark placed by another agency such as USGS or USACE. We found it 5/29/05 in Nantucket on Orange Street about 800 ft. SE of LW4180, the Unitarian Church Tower. It is set in a curbstone on the SE corner of a driveway at #43 Orange Street, on the S side of the street. Handheld coordinates N 41 16 49.5, W070 05 53.8. Stamping: NO. 31 DB The disk is of the same style as AJ4075, stamped NO. 31D. In addition to having pulled all Nantucket County datasheets at NGS, we have used Radial Search with the LW4180 coordinates, and just to be sure we have checked the NOS Tidal Mark file for Nantucket, which uses VM numbers instead of PIDs. No PID turns up. We regret that we have not yet figured out how to upload an image to the message board so it can be seen by anyone interested. We have a picture, and will be grateful for guidance on posting it. We’re hoping some wiser heads here can spare Deb Brown the trouble of an e-mail from us. Many thanks. m&h

Thank you! We've been reading for some time; it's a great gathering of resourceful folks. Thanks for the software tip. Cheers, m&h

We’re quite new to benchmark hunting, but are enjoying it. Yesterday we had an experience with online maps that we haven’t seen mentioned here. We had datasheets for three meridian stones on Nantucket that were placed in 1887 out toward the south side of the island. The southernmost and northernmost stones are about 435 feet apart, and the middle stone is almost in the middle—219 feet one way, 216 the other. The PIDs are LW4184, LW4251, and LW4252. The only datasheet with any directions is that for LW4251, the middle stone of the three. It says the middle stone is E-NE of the intersection of Lovers Lane and Atlantic Avenue. The next sentence contains a typo that places the stone 219 feet north of itself; must mean the south stone. In any case, various maps show that that stretch of the former Atlantic Avenue is now called Boulevarde. The GPSr, though, put us clearly on the west side of Lovers Lane. So that night we logged on to Terraserver, entered the coordinates, and toggled back and forth between the topo view and the photo view. The topo view showed Lovers Lane where it had been in 1955, as well as the row of stones just east of it, but the photo demonstrated that an approximately 800-foot stretch of the road had in later years swerved east of the row of stones. We went back the next day and found all three of them—even the south stone, which is broken off about 9” below ground level. Their condition is poor—the two intact stones lacking their metal caps, and the one broken off —but it was fun finding them. Nice to be here.