*Surveyors acknowledged last week that the Four Corners monument is not located at the exact spot where Arizona, Colorado, New Mexico and Utah come together, but disappointed tourists can look on the bright side: No one is likely to get shot over the discrepancy.
The same cannot be said of the Silver State’s longest and most infamous surveying dispute.
As recently as 1980, Nevada and California were still fighting over their roughly 600-mile border, which runs due south from Oregon to Lake Tahoe, then angles southeast to the Colorado River like watch hands set on 4 o’clock.*
The border marker in the far northeast of California is virtually unreachable, it’s some hike way out in the badlands, and nobody is really sure if it’s in the right spot.
That just opens up another can of worms. What do you do with every property – every farm, every yard, every business – that’s defined by a state line. That’s not just the ones that are right on the border; it also impacts every boundary that’s defined as being X distance from another boundary that ultimately gets defined by a state line.
That was the word on the street in 2009 but it isn’t true. Using primitive surveying techniques of the day, the original surveyor may have missed the intended target by about 1,800 feet (remarkably accurate given the tools and information available) but that doesn’t matter at all today. The 4 Corners Monument IS the exact legal boundary because each of the states agreed that it is binding and the monument is the ultimate landmark to determine the state borders in that area. In other words, the boundaries are exactly where the monument shows they are because it said so.
“Finally, we cannot overemphasize the fact that the aforementioned technical geodetic details are absolutely moot when considering any question of the correctness or validity of the Four Corners monument in marking the intersection of the four states. Indeed, the monument marks the exact spot where the four states meet. A basic tenet of boundary surveying is that once a monument has been established and accepted by the parties involved (in the case of the Four Corners monument, the parties were the four territories and the U.S. Congress), the location of the physical monument is the ultimate authority in delineating a boundary. Issues of legality trump scientific details, and the intended location of the point becomes secondary information. In surveying, monuments rule!”
That is good news because it means that countless tourists don’t have to apologize to their friends and family for feeding them a lie because it isn’t one. It was completely correct the entire time until people that wanted to play armchair state boundary surveyor got involved without understanding the rules.
But a lot of the confusion in 2009 was because young reporters had never heard of the Washington Meridian.
There are a couple of interesting books about the various state boundary disputes. Probably the best-known is Mark Stein’s book How the States Got Their Shapes, which became the loose basis of a TV series. It’s an entertaining book, but somehow completely omits any mention of the Washington Meridian, which is what several Western states were defined in relation to. Stein followed up with How the States Got Their Shapes Too: The People Behind the Borderlines, which focuses about the 17th and 18th century confusion, disputes, and skirmishes.
I’m currently reading (and can recommend) American Boundaries: The Nation, the States, the Rectangular Survey, by Bill Hubbard Jr. It goes into the same disputes, with superb maps, and also talks about how 18th and 19th century surveyors did their work and the work of the Public Land Survey System that shapes so much of the American landscape.
There are still “God Rocks” in Oklahoma that are still recoverable and they are “God” when it comes to a dispute.
No matter what other benchmarks are referenced if the survey comes off the “God” rock and it is different from your survey from a first order USGS marker, the “God Rock” survey wins.
If you take a look along the border that runs on the eastern side of Indian Land, there’s a street called Danby Rd., that begins in NC along the Lancaster Hwy, and meanders its way into SC, where 15 or 20 houses can be found. My school district services those homes. To get the students home, the bus circles around through NC; it’s about a 30 min. drive one way. A creek runs between them and the rest of the district. :smack:
Mostly, though, the boundary doesn’t run through actual neighborhoods, and, if it does, it’s recent development that knew what was going on at the time. Often, the NC side will have a different name than the SC side (there’s an example of that in our district as well).
The California-Nevada border dispute goes a long way back. At one point, Mono County in California had to move its county seat because the originally chosen mining town (Aurora) turned out to be in Nevada when the line was re-surveyed in 1863. If you’ve been out in that area, there’s a whole lot of nothing there…
Well, don’t forget that states have counties, and tax rates often differ between them. Farms might easily be in more than one county, and there are many examples of homes split by the county line.
Street View shows the “town limit” signs, but it looks like the houses will be (or are by now, as this image was from 2015) right next door to each other. Link
The swimming pool appears to be divided by the state line, but the line on the map might be slightly out.
Yes, it is out. Or, at least, it’s not where everyone thought it was; you can tell where they thought the state line was by looking where the trees are cut off.
That development has an interesting history. The homes on the SC side are on the property that was amassed by Jim and Tammy Faye Bakker for Heritage USA theme park. After they went belly up in 1989, the property sat there unused for the longest time. When I moved here in 2008, I remember driving through it and thinking it was all a bit surreal. In recent years, it’s been slowly developed into housing and business districts.
Although no land boundaries were in dispute, there was a disagreement between states like Rhode Island and the Federal Government over who controlled the waters of Long Island and Block Island Sounds. In 1985 the Supreme Court ruled in United States v. Maine that Long Island was not a natural island and that Long Island Sound was therefore a juridical bay under Article 7(6). Thus the waters west of the line from Montauk Point to Watch Hill Point are internal state waters.
Burkburnett TX. On I-44 going south, 2 years ago the city limit sign was right as soon as the bridge started over the Red River. Now, it’s right as you get off the bridge. Wish I had taken pics of it.
