| The General Land Office |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
| Township 10 South, Range 4 East |
| Township 11 South, Range 4 East |
| Township 11 South, Range 3 East |
| John Campbell, Deputy Surveyor General Land Office Lafayette Parish Surveyor Surveyor for Vermilionville (Lafayette) born 1800, died 1858 |
| " The surveyors, as they are respectively qualified, shall proceed to divide said territory into townships of 6 miles square, by lines running due north and south, and others crossing these at right angles, as near as may be, unless where the boundaries of the late Indian Purchases may render the same impracticable, and then they shall depart from this rule no further than such particular circumstances may require...As soon as 7 ranges of townships and fractional parts of townships, in the direction from south to north have been surveyed, the geographer shall transmit plats thereof to the board of treasury, who shall the same, with the report in well bound books to be dept for that purpose" Land Ordinance 1785 |
| With the Land Ordinance of 1785, the need for an organization to carry out the newly created mandates became vital. A vast amount of land had to be surveyed, maps drawn, meticulous records kept, along with a considerable degree of oversight. Therefore in 1812, Congress, with the Act of April 25, 2 Stat. 716, created the General Land Office (GLO) and placed it under the jurisdiction of The Treasury Department. A couple of weeks lated, President Madison appointed Edward Tiffin as the first commissioner. He was able to organize a structure, pull the immense number of land records together and begin the Herculean operation of surveying newly-acquired territories, the Louisiana Purchase in particular. Along with new ogranization, a new method of surveying was employed. Previously, land had been surveyed using a system called metes and bounds, in which surveyors start at a fixed point, usually determined by a local natural or artificial monument, and ran lines by compass course and distance. But the Land ordinance of 1785 also mandated that surveyors use the new (at that time) rectangular system, where by the land was partitioned into township and range |
| with 36 parcels per township, each one one square mile or 640 acres. Each township itself is six miles square and based on a series of principle meridians and baselines running across the land. There are only 30 states, known as the Public Land States, wihich were surveyed using the rectangular system. The original 13 colonies and their then territories (the states of Kentucky, Maine, Tennessee, Vermont, Virginia, West Virginia) also Hawaii and Texas were surveyed with metes and bounds or other methods. The original plat maps drawn by GLO geographers have become very valuable resources to a wide range of scholars and professionals, from archaelologists, and historians to engineers and surveyors. Initially, three copies were struck: One for the Surveyor General, one for the GLO office in Washington, D.C., and one for local land offices. More recently, these plats have been committed to microfilm, microfiche, and electronic format such as CD ROM and Web-based documents. While this sounds like many copies abound and access is abundant, these plats acctually can be very hard to find because they are held by a wide variety of organizations-governmental bodies, libraries, archives and historical societies. Nor do they have a title proper, so many times they fall under different catagories within an organization, such as manuscripts, collections, map collections or microfilm collections. Tom Huber, Library Technical Specialist Illinois State Library Springfield, Illinois |
| General Land Office, established (1812) in the U.S. Treasury Dept. and transferred (1849) to the U.S. Dept. of the Interior. Empowered to survey, manage, and dispose of the public domain, the office administered the preemeption acts, homestead laws, and all legislation affecting public lands. After 1900 it was more concerned with conservation of the remaining land. in 1946 it was consolidated with the Grazing Service into the Bureau of Land Management. |
| This (close- up) 1879 General Land Office Map of Louisiana shows the Southern Boundary line well into Township 11 South 3 East at Section 9 & 10 where Coulee Jean Granger drains in a Southwesterly direction to Bayou Grand Marais. The small encircled "M" added represents the town of Maurice, Louisiana. |
 |