Recovered Granite Stone Versus a Fifty-Year-Old Fence
Your firm is retracing the south boundary of a 160-acre parcel in Elko County. The 1889 GLO plat places the south quarter corner of Section 14 at 2,640.00 feet north of the section corner on the baseline, on a line bearing N 0 degrees 06 minutes W. At the record position you find no evidence at all. Four and one-tenth feet south and eight-tenths of a foot east of it you recover a buried granite stone 14 by 10 by 5 inches, set 16 inches deep, with a faint chiseled '1/4' on its west face, broken glass at its base, and a shallow pit beside it. The adjoining owner to the south has maintained a woven-wire fence 11 feet south of the stone since 1978 and has paid taxes on the strip. His attorney has written demanding that you 'hold the fence as the accepted boundary and stop confusing my client with rocks.' Your client needs a signed plat in ten days.
1. Identify the controlling evidence for the south quarter corner, explain how you would test the stone before accepting it, and state what weight the fence carries.
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Controlling evidence. A monument of the original GLO survey, once identified as original, controls over every record distance, bearing and area. Record dimensions are used to search for the corner, not to correct it. Proportionate measurement is a remedy for a lost corner only, never a tool for adjusting a found original one.
Testing the stone. Compare it item by item with the 1889 field notes: material, dimensions, depth set, the chiseled mark, and the required accessories (pits, mound, bearing trees, sometimes a bottle or glass). A granite stone with a matching chiseled quarter mark, set to the recorded depth with glass at the base, is strong collateral evidence. If the notes describe a cedar post and a later record of survey shows a stone set in the 1970s, the stone may be that resurvey monument rather than the GLO corner, which changes the analysis.
The fence. Occupation is evidence of acquiescence or agreement between neighbors; it is not evidence of where the original surveyor set the corner. It does not move an original monument.
2. Suppose the section corner on the baseline is also lost. How does that change your treatment of the stone and of the 2,640.00-foot record distance?
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You cannot measure 2,640.00 feet from a corner that does not exist; a record distance measured from a lost corner has no positional authority. The south quarter corner becomes a lost corner and is reestablished by single proportionate measurement along the line between the nearest accepted original corners, ordinarily the section corners north and south of the quarter corner, or the township corners if those are also gone.
Once you compute the proportioned position, the recovered stone shifts from 'controlling monument' to 'collateral evidence.' If the proportioned position falls within a few tenths of the stone, and the stone matches the GLO notes, the agreement corroborates the stone and it may be accepted as the corner. If the proportioned position falls several feet away, the stone is probably not the original and should not govern.
The key discipline is consistency: you never mix methods by holding a found monument on one leg while proportioning a lost corner on the adjacent leg using raw record distances. Record the record distance, the measured distance, and the proportioning basis in your file.
3. The attorney demands the fence be held. Describe exactly what appears on the plat and in the transmittal letter, and what you refuse to do.
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On the plat:
- The stone with its monument symbol, plus ties from the record position (4.1 ft south, 0.8 ft east).
- Record bearing and distance shown alongside measured values.
- The fence drawn as a separate line labeled 'line of occupation (woven-wire fence),' with offsets to the boundary at each end. It is not labeled 'property line' and is not dimensioned as the boundary.
In the transmittal: the basis for accepting the stone, an explicit statement that the fence does not coincide with the boundary, and a note that the surveyor locates and depicts evidence while the location of title is a legal question for counsel or a court.
What you refuse: signing a plat that depicts the fence as the deed line, deleting the stone, or omitting the fence so the conflict disappears. Any of those would be a false depiction, would mislead the client and any later purchaser, and would expose you to Board discipline and civil liability. If the client insists, decline the assignment in writing.