What Is This Thing?

[+scolba]

Heya guys, it was suggested that I ask this question in here, so here I go!

 

(Other topic: http://forums.Groundspeak.com/GC/index.php?showtopic=135607)

 

On the way to go fishing yesterday, I was staring at my GPSr (the little 'r' means reciever, right?), and I noticed a small 'X' on the GPSr next to the road we were on. My first thought was, hidden treasure?? Maybe its that Volvo!! lol...just kidding. Anyway, it did peak my curiosity, so on the way home we stopped to see what it was. So I snapped a pic of it and posted it in the 'Getting Started' forum. Some suggested that it was right of way marker, just labled differently. Somebody else said that it could be a marker used for surveying land using the township-range method. I got no idea, so maybe you guys can help!! Whatcha think???

 

 

Thanks a lot!

 

Scott

Edited June 15, 2006 by scolba

[+Klemmer]

Hi Scolba:

I'm thinking the other forum was right in sending you over here. I'm not the super-expert here (we do have some!), but my guess is that it's a local property marker (Township? County? City?). Near any of those that make sense with "TR" as initials? I checked the NGS benchmark station names in IL (right?), but nothing comes up with 101 TR (or variations of that) in IL.

 

Did you save or write down the Lat & Long there? That could be useful.

 

If you were interested in that marker post, sounds like you might be just the right sort of person to be interested in looking for benchmarks. Check out the ME FIRST thread at the top of this forum. You might find our "hobby" here very interesting.

Edited June 16, 2006 by Klemmer & TeddyBearMama

[+scolba]

Yup! sure did! The coordinates are N40 09.348 W88 55.066

 

I think Township is the leading candidate at this point. are those boundaries typically marked on Topo maps??

[+scolba]

If you were interested in that marker post, sounds like you might be just the right sort of person to be interested in looking for benchmarks. Check out the ME FIRST thread at the top of this forum. You might find our "hobby" here very interesting.

 

I find it HUGELY interesting!! As a matter of fact, earlier today loaded up the coordinates for about 10 different benchmarks and printed out the descriptions of the locations! As soon as my fiance gets home tonight, we are headed out to look for some of them!! There's a whole SLEW of them around here that haven't been "recovered" yet! I'm excited to go!

[Team Fawlty]

Hey! I was going to harvest that area! Just kidding. A friend of mine works down there at ISU. Good hunting.

 

Brendan

[+jwahl]

That type of monument is more commonly used for a Right of Way marker, and since it was along a road, that adds some evidence to that possibility. TR could be a lot of things, Town Road, some county, state or local road designation?

 

jerry w.

 

Yup! sure did! The coordinates are N40 09.348 W88 55.066

 

I think Township is the leading candidate at this point. are those boundaries typically marked on Topo maps??

[+Kewaneh & Shark]

The coordinates are very close to a PLSS section corner location and it is located approximately one mile north of the Township corner. It is also about a mile east of the city limit line of Clinton, Ill. It could be a marker or type of witness post for the section corner. It could be the actual corner, too, but the type of construction (stone column) is an antiquated style, and it looks fairly new. The markings are unfamiliar as well. Were there other markings on the other sides of the column? Columns used for PLSS corners should have different markings on each side of the column.

 

- Kewaneh

[+scolba]

nope...just the one side. I made sure to look all around it, and i walked around a bit to see if it was marking a historical area or something. There are a lot of old school cornerstones in the country here, but didn't find squat.

 

I was confused too because it looks old, but not too worn....its not real far from a nuclear power plant...so maybe the radiation is keeping it new looking! LOL...maybe not.

[+scolba]

Hey! I was going to harvest that area! Just kidding. A friend of mine works down there at ISU. Good hunting.

 

Brendan

 

I tell ya...the more people I meet, the smaller the world gets. But I guess thats pretty intuitive, huh?? thanks for the good luck! you seem like a really nice group of folks 'round these parts.

Edited June 15, 2006 by scolba

[+Shorelander]

TR feels like Township Range to me. So I'd go with PLSS.

[holograph]

The GPS coordinates are close to a township line, and what looks like a section corner, but about 50 meters from it. When I first saw the picture of the concrete post, I thought "Township road". It looks similar to many metal signs for numbered "county road" markers here in the East. Maybe it marks something like mile -0- of the township road? It might make sense to have mile zero start at the edge of the township.

 

The map below is in NAD83 datum, so the 50 meter difference isn't just a datum thing. It might be a consumer GPS error thing. I also verified the location of the township line with another dataset obtained from the Illinois GIS clearinghouse.

 

The map clearly shows the section corner to be south of the road. Was the concrete post north or south of the road?

 

[+scolba]

The post was on the north end of the road, and I would deffinately say that it was in line with the boundry there. It was just as you entered the gentle curve from the east, rather than as far in as the point illustrated.

 

Thanks a lot for all the help everybody!! I really appreciate it!

[holograph]

If it was aligned with the fence as shown by the small red X in the Terraserver image below, then it could easily be sitting at the section corner for the eastern township. Whether it actually is the corner marker is still unknown, given the somewhat cryptic inscription.

 

[+scolba]

That gets my vote!

 

So I guess my last question regarding it, is are township corners typically marked like that on Topo maps? If not, any idea why this one is marked? Maybe just because there is the stone monument there, the person/team who made the topo map for that area decided to mark it?? Ok, thats 3 questions....but then we can put this one to bed!!!

[holograph]

USGS quads often show the township and section lines, but not always. Section lines are typically red lines, and township lines may simply be annotated next to the section lines, or shown as a dashed black line as the example showed. The corners receive no special marking, they are just where the sections meet.

 

I should have stated that I added the red annotations and marks to the images, except for the horizontal red section line in the quad image. My additions were from digital datasets available online.

 

You can go to www.topozone.com to view a digitized version of the topo quad.

[Bill93]

It may not explain your post, but it appears that something unusual went on here in the land survey.

 

I thought of the Third Principal Meridian, but your post is about 3 townships east of 3rd PM, and more than 101 miles north of its initial point, so no help there.

 

There appear to be double corners on the north-south line of this township, very evident at sections 30-31-25-36 and 19-30-24-25. This is unusual, and suggests that there were two different surveys made along the north-south township line where this post is. One controls the sections to the east, and the other to the west. I can't understand why. I guess the alternative explanation is that one surveyor doing the subdivision into sections couldn't find the corners left by the guy doing the township lines, and made his own measurements. This would be irregular, and doesn't explain why the guy on the other side did find them presumably not many years apart.

 

I don't know if there is such a resource for Illinois, but for Iowa there is a published book that has most of the instructions for the original surveys. That might explain why the double corners exist, and what the inscription means if the post indeed has anything to do with them.

 

There is a correction line at the north end of this township (north of Thorp Landing Field) as sections 1-6 of these townships are only a little over a half mile in the N-S direction. The double corners on the east-west correction line are commonplace.

[+scolba]

USGS quads often show the township and section lines, but not always. Section lines are typically red lines, and township lines may simply be annotated next to the section lines, or shown as a dashed black line as the example showed. The corners receive no special marking, they are just where the sections meet.

 

I should have stated that I added the red annotations and marks to the images, except for the horizontal red section line in the quad image. My additions were from digital datasets available online.

 

You can go to www.topozone.com to view a digitized version of the topo quad.

 

So the "X" on the GPSr where the marker was is kind of an anomoly then? not something that is typical?

[+scolba]

It may not explain your post, but it appears that something unusual went on here in the land survey.

 

I thought of the Third Principal Meridian, but your post is about 3 townships east of 3rd PM, and more than 101 miles north of its initial point, so no help there.

 

There appear to be double corners on the north-south line of this township, very evident at sections 30-31-25-36 and 19-30-24-25. This is unusual, and suggests that there were two different surveys made along the north-south township line where this post is. One controls the sections to the east, and the other to the west. I can't understand why. I guess the alternative explanation is that one surveyor doing the subdivision into sections couldn't find the corners left by the guy doing the township lines, and made his own measurements. This would be irregular, and doesn't explain why the guy on the other side did find them presumably not many years apart.

 

I don't know if there is such a resource for Illinois, but for Iowa there is a published book that has most of the instructions for the original surveys. That might explain why the double corners exist, and what the inscription means if the post indeed has anything to do with them.

 

There is a correction line at the north end of this township (north of Thorp Landing Field) as sections 1-6 of these townships are only a little over a half mile in the N-S direction. The double corners on the east-west correction line are commonplace.

 

holy schnikies! im gonna have to either learn about this stuff for another 6 months, or re-read that about 50 times, or both!! thats way over my head!! but cool none the less that there is a problem there! History like this is really cool.

[2oldfarts (the rockhounders)]

scolba, welcome to the world of benchmark hunting.

 

I was just wondering - is there an "Official Trail" of some kind running along by this post? It would be either a "Hiking" or a "Biking" or an "ATV" or a "4X4" trail.

 

This "TR" post looks like one of the hiking markers that we have seen.....somewhere on our many wanderings.....can't remember where. If you have a mapping program like ours (Mapsend) -- you can choose "Trails" to show on your GPSr. And some GPSr units come with them loaded - you might try looking at the manual that came with your unit to find out or 'Google it'.

 

Shirley - the female half of the - 2oldfarts.

[+scolba]

negative....no trails in the area, unless the road itself is a trail....just fileds and fields and fields, and fields and a lake. lol

 

Shoot, I wish there were established 4x4 trails in the area. I used to be a big time offroader...but had to travel 2 hours east of here to wheel because that was the closest legal park. but thats a different topic all together!

[holograph]

So the "X" on the GPSr where the marker was is kind of an anomoly then? not something that is typical?

 

I'd have to say guess, it was some kind of anomaly. Perhaps the maps you had loaded into your GPSr were annotated for some reason? There's nothing obviously special about that point. Section corners occur every mile, and I would be surprised if a GPSr map indicated them. Have you seen the same kind of indicator other places? What kind of map was loaded in the GPSr?

 

USGS topo quads do have small X marks at benchmarks, and many of those benchmarks are not in the NGS database that we use, but I don't see one near the monument that you found. The closest ones were 800 meters (1/2 mile) west and 900 meters east of that monument along the same road.

 

Some time in the past year, someone noticed that their GPSr seemed to have indicators that would pop up and then disappear along their path. They thought they might be benchmark indicators, but it turned out that their brand of GPSr had an automatic trackback feature that was simply displaying the next waypoint on the track they had taken. Any chance it was that kind of feature?

[+scolba]

The map was from the Garmin US Topo - East. The device is an eTrex Legend. I don't think it was a waypoint feature, because the only ones i had loaded in there at that time were in McLean, IL and Atlanta, IL, about 15-20 mi W and WNW of there. That and this was the first time i had ever been to that location with my GPSr ever.

 

Its deffinately part of the map...i can go to http://www.garmin.com/cartography and demo that map, zoom into that area, and there is a 'dot' at that exact spot labled "725"....presumably the elevation

 

Maybe i'll add waypoints for this weekend for some other dot's that are nearby and see what is at those locations. maybe that could shed some more light on the reason for it being on the map....think thats worth a shot?

Edited June 16, 2006 by scolba

[holograph]

I do see it in the Garmin demo, and it is simply the elevation at that point. Why Garmin chose to mark that point and not many others is a mystery. It's definitely anomalous.

 

edit: P.S. they put a similarly mysterious mark at "745" outside of Wapella a little to the north. It, too, seems to be just the elevation along the road. The point is approximately N40 12.833 W088 56.167. There are probably others.

Edited June 16, 2006 by holograph

[Difficult Run]

http://www.garmin.com/cartography and demo that map, zoom into that area, and there is a 'dot' at that exact spot labled "725"....presumably the elevation

 

I see that dot on my copy of mapsource also.

 

The '725' is an elevation, but not a benchmark. It is what's known as a "UE" or Useful Elevation. Typically, the USGS set these UEs every mile and benchmarks set every 3 miles. Most of these UEs have no disk, but rather are chiseled squares in a concrete abutment/spike or PK nail driven into the base of a tree/etc, etc. They are usually denoted by an "X" on the USGS maps.

 

The purpose of these UEs were for establishing multiple known points of elevation, so the cartographers could draw the contour lines.

 

It is possible that a surveyor used the post to establish a UE there, since it was a convenient, "no hassle" point.

 

Remember that Garmin uses the USGS Raster files, and edits out a lot of details. Perhaps, this elevation got past them.

 

Regards,

~ Mitch ~

 

[Edited to add additional comment]

Edited June 16, 2006 by Difficult Run

[+scolba]

.....

It is possible that a surveyor used the post to establish a UE there, since it was a convenient, "no hassle" point.

.......

 

oooooooh yeah...now THAT sure would explain the coincidence!!! A multi-purpose point! lol...