Forgottonia's Founding Lines: Mapping the Uncharted Frontier

By - Harry Bulkeley

It's the first thing you notice when you fly over Forgottonia. Those great big checkerboard squares that mark off the flat land below. Flying or driving, you can't help but notice the straight lines on our territory. But how did they get here? Who laid them out?

Obviously, surveyors measured and marked them, but the story of how they did it is a tale of true heroism. It may seem strange to call surveyors "heroes," but Andro Linklater's book  "Measuring America" tells just how difficult the job was.

The United States decided early on that it needed to survey the territory that it had won (or the British abandoned) in the Revolution. Both George Washington and Thomas Jefferson had been surveyors, so they knew how important it was to mark the land so it could be easily bought and sold. Most of it was wilderness, which meant surveying teams would have a rough go as they measured it.

The teams were small and on horseback with a couple of surveyors, their helpers, and some big, burly lumberjacks to cut down the trees that blocked the sight lines of the surveyors. Their equipment was rudimentary as well. A "circumferentor" was the strange name for the instrument that preceded the transit that we are more familiar with. It allowed them to site straight lines as they moved through the wilderness. A Gunter's chain was an invaluable measuring tool which was "four perches in length" (that translates to 22 yards or 66 feet) divided into 100 links.. That is a very odd measurement, but it was the primary way that frontier land was marked.

You know you're really out in the wilderness when you're making the maps. That was what confronted the surveying teams. This was literally uncharted territory. It was their job to make sense of it and to do that; they had to start somewhere. The territory they were marking would become the states of Ohio, Indiana, and Illinois, plus parts of some others. They first worked in Ohio and, by all accounts, made a mess of it. Even though they had hired people who were reputed to be the best, their lines weren't straight, and their measurements weren't accurate.

By the time they got to the Illinois territory, they had a better idea of what they were doing. Still, one survey party didn't get off to a great start in 1815. Their instructions were to start forty miles due north of the confluence of the Illinois and Mississippi rivers. When they got there, they found that spot was in the middle of the river so they had to improvise and lay out on solid ground just west of the future site of Beardstown.

From there, they followed the established procedure of first laying out the north-south line known as the "Principal Meridian," in this case, called the Fourth. As they moved north, they first marked every six miles on the line. One of many amazing things they had to do was lay those marks six miles apart as the crow flies. That meant that if there was a steep hill or deep gulley along the way, they had to account for it and make sure the points were all exactly six miles apart. That is why it looks like a checkerboard.

Then, they had to go back and lay out the east-west or baseline in the same way. But wait, there's more. After they marked off the six-mile squares, they had to mark off each of the 36 square miles within each of them into sections. All the while, they are keeping notes and numbering each section. They left markers at each corner, but sometimes, they were nothing more than a few rocks or a mark on a tree. Many of them weren't permanent and could easily be destroyed by greedy landowners. 

Even the best surveyor makes mistakes and they always made up those mistakes in the northwest corner of the squares that needed it. Early settlers knew that if their farm included a northwest quarter section, it was probably a little irregular. Each section was one-mile square or 640 acres. Fun fact- the numbers were laid out "boustrophedonically". That literally means how you plow a field with an ox. West along the top row, then back to the east on the second row. Section 16 was always designated for a "school section" from back in the days of the one-room schoolhouse that all the kids walked to.

Okay, surveying is kind of interesting but what does it have to do with our homeland Forgottonia? I'm glad you asked. Remember that Fourth Principal meridian I mentioned earlier? It so happens that that very line runs right through the middle of Forgottonia. It is the eastern border of McDonough and Warren County and the western border of Knox and Fulton. St. Augustine is in Knox County, Greenbush is in Warren; Bernadotte is in Fulton, Adair is in McDonough and running smack in between them is that famous Fourth Principal Meridian.

You can't see it in most places (except maybe from a plane) but it has been there before anybody else moved out here.