How to find OLD Benchmarks

[+dino_hunters]

How do you go about finding old benchmarks? I don;t mean physkcally finding them, but finding out about them, so you can go look for them physically? How do I find out if there are any near me?

 

jjb

[+parkrrrr]

I was just wondering that myself earlier today. Unfortunately, bmgpx uses the current date for the "date hidden," but I think I can convince it to use the "monumented" date for benchmarks that include a History line. I'll let y'all know if I get it working.

 

[+happycycler]

Yes the

quote:

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monumented date

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or the

quote:

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first observed

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date are what I use to decide which ones are the oldest. The only way that I know now is to look at each data sheet. But of course my mentor rogbarn (who sometimes posts to this forum) has built a list of the oldest ones with 100 miles of a St. Louis, MO suburb. He shared that with me.

Now if I could just find some of those 1871 markers!

[+rogbarn]

Learning the ins and outs of the NGS site and being a bit computer savvy is my key to getting all the information I want. Downloading datasheets for a whole county at a time is very easy thru the archival datasheets. I recently grabbed all of the counties for the state of Missouri. From there, I wrote a little program to summarize each benchmark into a file, one line per benchmark. I import that file into Excel which allows me to sort on any column, such as first history date.

[+parkrrrr]

For whatever it's worth, I've made the appropriate changes to bmgpx so that the "date hidden" is the monumented date. You can then sort the list using Watcher to find the oldest marker.

 

In testing, I discovered that the oldest marker in my county dates from 1930, so there won't be any competition for the "oldest marker" prize from this quarter.

 

[+dino_hunters]

I just downloaded and ran the lattest version of your program, and it still has todays date as the date hidden, when using Watcher. I think it would be a nice feature.

 

thanks for the great program.

[+user13371]

Ooh, I could Markwell this, but I'll just re-iterate something I wrote in another thread last night.

 

Like RogBarn, I downloaded datasheet archives for my county and several near me in southeastern Michigan. Then I wrote a short program to scan for MONUMENTED and FIRST OBSERVED dates.

 

Out of around 1300 benchmarks, I only found 8 dated before 1900, and 11 from 1900-1909.

 

I live in Oakland County, which is landlocked, but it borders St Clair, Macomb, and Wayne counties, which border major waterways. ALL of the older benchmarks I found were for lighthouses or other shoreline landmarks.

 

No antique benchmark hunting for me, I guess.

 

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LDR.