How Surveying Shaped Early America

America’s semiquincentennial marks 250 years of the Declaration of Independence, which, when signed and circulated in July 1776, formally announced the birth of our nation and the formation of our government.

But the founding of what would become America stretches back nearly 150 years prior. The growth of the colonies and Boston, New York, Newport, Philadelphia, Williamsburg, and Charleston were made possible not just by farmers, tradesmen, businessmen, and policymakers, but by those working in one often overlooked but vitally important profession: surveying.

The surveyor delineates legal property boundaries that are used for ownership transactions and dispute resolution. Surveying is also key in civil planning, from constructing buildings to establishing municipalities.

Surveying is as important in America today as it was at the nation’s founding.

Surveying and mapping have also been a key part of Erdman Anthony’s multidisciplinary services since our firm’s founding in 1954, when we provided significant surveying and civil design work as the largest public works program in U.S. history began to reshape the country’s landscape.

Surveying: a Foundational Education and Prestigious Profession for Future Leaders

In early colonial America, land was the primary form of wealth, making the surveying profession integral to life and commerce. The establishment of farmsteads, businesses, and tracts that would grow into towns and cities meant surveyors, who were among the most well-educated individuals in a community, enjoyed prestige and respect from land speculators and local government officials.

Surveyors were, as a result, well connected socially, financially, and, eventually, politically.

In the 18^th century, every young man receiving an education to prepare for a life of opportunity would learn the fundamentals of surveying as a practical application of math and geometry, as did America’s first president, George Washington, who was working as a surveyor by age 17.

Surveying was also often a family business, as it was for Thomas Jefferson, America’s third president, who started out as a surveyor with his father, Peter, for the Crown in Virginia.

It’s worth recognizing that surveying also created a pipeline of leaders by providing an entire generation of young men with vital hands-on knowledge about the people and places that were the building blocks of a fledgling nation.

Surveyors among America’s Future Leaders

Many founders weren’t politicians who just happened to know about land; they were surveyors who became politicians. Notably:

George Washington

Washington was a founding surveyor of Virginia and completed nearly 200 surveys totaling more than 60,000 acres by age 20, in 1752. Among his earliest land surveys were of the turnip garden at Mount Vernon that belonged to his older half-brother Lawrence. Surveying northern Virginia for Lord Fairfax forged relationships with Virginia society’s powerful influencers, helping him secure, at age 17, an appointment as the surveyor for the newly created Culpeper County.

Washington’s commission as a major in the Virginia colony’s militia at the beginning of the French and Indian War was owed entirely to his knowledge of the Virginia backcountry and mapmaking skills developed as a surveyor. He would go on to hone his military skill during that war, attaining the rank of lieutenant colonel.

John Adams

Adams, America’s first vice president and second president, is better known as a lawyer, Massachusetts delegate to the First Continental Congress, member of the committee that produced the Declaration of Independence, and key international diplomat during the American Revolution. But he also served as a highway surveyor for Braintree, Massachusetts, in 1765, overseeing road maintenance and, later, for dividing, planning, and selling the North Commons.

While surveying was not a profession he sought or continued, it was the role of highway surveyor that acquainted Adams with municipal matters and how they impacted people. The year of his appointment as a surveyor was also the implementation of the Stamp Act, a tax he vehemently opposed. Thus began his first steps toward helping shape America’s early history.

Abraham Lincoln

Lincoln is also better known as a lawyer, but he began an early career as a self-taught surveyor, serving in 1833 as deputy surveyor of Sangamon County, Illinois. Again, familiarity with the people and the conditions of where they made their livings would be useful when Lincoln ran for, and won, his first political contest— for a seat in the Illinois state legislature in 1834.

People and Policymaking in a New Nation

Surveyors not only understood the land itself and the administration of it. Getting to know the people and conditions that existed for them to carve out a life was essential to being the successful policymakers that the new American government would need.

The work of defining property boundaries became even more critical after the colonists won the War of Independence in 1783, and the Treaty of Paris ceded to the new nation what was called the Northwest Territory.

Building a New Nation: the Northwest Territory

That expanse of land coming under the purview of the new U.S. government as the Treaty of Paris was signed would be vitally important to solving a big problem — paying off Revolutionary War debt.

Selling that land would raise the capital needed to pay off the nations that had backed the new country during the war and fill the nation’s treasury. Some of that land would also be used to pay veterans in lieu of cash.

But all that territory first needed to be surveyed.

Not only would the “original wild west” of western New York, Pennsylvania, and Virginia need to be surveyed for new settlements, so would the Northwest Territory, which would comprise Ohio, Michigan, Indiana, Illinois, Wisconsin, and parts of northeastern Minnesota.

1785 Land Ordinance and Jefferson’s Public Land Survey System

Up to this time, the old colonial “metes and bounds” system of surveying was still employed, anchoring boundaries to natural landmarks that easily shifted, resulting in irregular shapes — and disputes. It was this old system that Jefferson would have been familiar with from his father’s career and his own brief stint as surveyor of Albemarle County, Virginia. While Jefferson left that commission after a year, he would continue to survey his own land at Monticello throughout his life.

It was this foundational and personal understanding of metes and bounds (and the system’s limitations) that would guide Jefferson and the young country through a critical period of reimagining land policy.

Selling Northwest Territory land in 160-acre plots at $2.50 an acre would bring in badly needed cash, but a better system was needed to accomplish the westward survey quickly and efficiently. To make that system scalable and far less prone to dispute, Jefferson, then a congressional delegate, helped create the Public Land Survey System (PLSS): a rectangular grid anchored to fixed meridian and baseline reference points, rather than to landmarks that could move or disappear.

This decision still shapes the American map today. Look at county lines in the Eastern states, and you’ll see irregular, organic shapes — leftovers of the old metes and bounds system. Look at the Midwest, and you’ll see squares and rectangles, a direct visual legacy of Jefferson’s grid. It’s one of the rare cases where a piece of 18th-century administrative policy is still visible from an airplane window.

(This westward expansion of surveyed land also involved treaties and land cessions that affected Native nations already located on that land — a significant and separate chapter of this history in its own right.)

Surveying for Washington, D.C.

Perhaps the most symbolic impact that surveying had on early America was the creation of the new capital in Washington, D.C.

Before the federal government could formally establish itself in a new capital city, someone had to measure and mark its boundaries. In 1791, that task fell to Andrew Ellicott and Benjamin Banneker, who together surveyed the boundaries of what would become the District of Columbia.

Banneker’s role is particularly notable: a free Black astronomer and mathematician, he brought serious technical expertise to one of the new nation’s most visible founding projects at a time when his contributions were far from guaranteed recognition. The survey they completed didn’t just mark property lines; it laid the physical groundwork for the seat of American government itself.

Lewis and Clark and the Louisiana Purchase

In 1803, Jefferson’s Louisiana Purchase more than doubled the size of the United States, but the government had bought unknown land. Even before negotiations with France concluded, Jefferson asked Congress to fund an expedition to survey the new territory, appointing Meriwether Lewis to lead it.

This was framed explicitly as a mapping and surveying mission, not simple exploration, tasked with charting the land and searching for an all-water route from the Missouri River to the Pacific.

Lewis brought in William Clark specifically for his surveying and drafting skills. Clark’s exceptional mapmaking abilities proved invaluable, and he kept detailed records throughout the 8,000-mile journey.

Surveying and Surveyors Shaped America

In 1761, Washington fully inherited the 8,000-acre Mount Vernon plantation and lived there until his death in 1799. He continued to survey the property up until one month before he died.

That alone shows that surveying has deep roots in America. It is both a property system and a profession that shaped the nation and its founders. Surveyors were and still are skilled and dedicated professionals who have touched the land from coast to coast, from community to community.

Erdman Anthony is proud to be part of that tradition as our firm continues to provide surveying and mapping services for projects that support a prosperous America and meet the needs of our nation’s communities.

Read more about Erdman Anthony’s 70-plus years of history here.

Martin Gotwalt and Karin Pecora are based at Erdman Anthony’s Rochester, NY, office.