PLSO The Oregon Surveyor Sept/Oct 2020

14 Vol. 43, No. 5 The Oregon Surveyor  | Photo 8: Typical remains of a lot corner. Photo 9: Scott Freshwaters and Roy Easter unearthing a Block corner. among his peers. However, he hardly ever put a date on any of his surveys and his plats weren’t necessarily the prettiest. I suspect Survey CS10244 was done for Bend Aggregate when they bought the property and he decided to file a copy at the Surveyor’s Office. I’m eternally grate - ful for his doing so. We had set azimuth pairs that were ob- servedwith static GPS sessions (remember, this is the year 2000) around the project and commenced to run some control traverses into the county property. We found and tied some of Perry’s original found corners along with some topo- graphic features that could be identified on an aerial photo. We had access to 1994 USGS Digital Ortho Quad grayscale satel- lite imagery of this area that would save us a lot of time in our search. In AutoCAD, wemoved and rotated the re- cord plat to the found Perry monuments and then brought in a .tiff of the 1994 ae - rial. This image was scaled and rotated to the topo ties we had made in the field. The next stepwas to digitize the “islands” of undisturbed land in the project area (Pho- to 6). Search points were snapped to all the potential corners within these islands. The Search Begins The field crew consisted of Scott Fresh - waters, PLS, the notorious party chief Roy Easter, and myself. Starting at the south end of the plat where we tied one of Per- ry’s original stake perpetuations, we set the gunup and started spraying out search points, marking themwith lath. Then, like a Le Mans-style start, the three of us ran with shovels in hand to the first three search points and started digging, hoping to be the first to find an ancient corner. We carefully removed the overburden of bunch grass and loose sandy soil in a large area at the search centers. After the first couple scrapes, a more compacted min- eral soil was encountered. The digging became more exacting, just shaving off about a quarter-inch of soil like Mike Pul- zone had shown me back in 1978. And then, like a miner panning for gold, Scott spied “color” in the crater he had dug . . . little flakes of wood debris splayed out in the hole after a pass of the shovel. More precise scraping with a hand trowel revealed a small, dark square of soil. Yee- haw! We dug the dirt away from the sides of the square with a knife and there were the rotted remains of awooden stake likely last touched by one of Thomas’ chainmen 96 years prior to our visit! At most corners we found evidence at half a foot below the surface, but some stakes were up to 18 inches below ground level (Photo 7). Lot corners were rough- ly 1x1-inch square with pointed tips like hubs (Photo 8). Block corners were larg- er and blunter than the lot corners. The block corners were generally 1x2-inches in cross-section (Photos 9 and 10). The length varied from four inches to just a one inch stub of the stake’s tip. We had great success finding corners in areas that were undisturbed and had light vegeta- tion/ground cover. If a clump of bunch grass or bitterbrush was at ground zero, the corners had completely rotted away. We recovered 22 original monuments and replaced them with capped rebars. Featured Article continued from previous page T