So What If Four Corners Is a Little Off?
It’s not that the Four Corners marker is “about 2.5 miles west of where it should be,” as the Deseret News puts it, it’s that it’s about two and a half miles west of where it should have been. Important distinction. Surveyors were aiming for 37° N 100° W when they placed the first marker in 1868; and modern-day observers with GPS receivers can easily spot the discrepancy. Doesn’t mean the borders are going to be redrawn. There are plenty of surveying errors along the U.S.-Canada border that are now accepted as fact, for example.
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It’s a established principle in Boundary Surveying that monuments from an original survey, i.e. the first survey in an area to establish a certain boundary line, always hold, regardless of whether they are in the location that they survey plat says it is or not. It is assumed that the surveyor set the monument in what he determined to be the correct position by the standards and equipment of his time. All kinds of problems ensue when modern surveyors with their highly accurate equipment try to ‘correct’ errors in an old survey.
April 21, 2009 at 11:01 AM
That was my understanding; thanks for explaining it.
April 21, 2009 at 5:43 PM
There was a similar error when the border between South Australia and Victoria was surveyed in the 1840s. It was supposed to be the 141st meridian, but was actually about 3.6km west. After a court challenge by SA, the surveyed border was upheld. My photo of a sign explaining this in more detail: http://www.flickr.com/photos/overton/3465760840/
April 22, 2009 at 8:28 PM