Dividing Lines: Surveyors and the Crossing of the Colonies

Surveying has never counted as a very glamorous profession, but it has remained a useful and productive one over the course of human history. In particular, the opening up of America relied on the efforts of those who charted and parcelled up the land as the new country expanded, quite as much as it did on those of explorers and pioneers. This essay will try to justify the claims just made. It will begin with a rapid survey of the evolution of surveying, with a few brief reflections on boundaries. Second, it will consider the role of some prominent surveyors in the creation of British America during the colonial period. Throughout these two sections the main emphasis will lie on Anglo-Saxon practice, with no attention for example to the large part which the French, especially, and the Spanish played in other parts of the North American continent. Third, the essay will discuss the contentions over the border between Virginia and North Carolina in the decades before and after 1700, and will look at a famous work dealing with an expedition which was mounted in 1728 with the aim of settling some of the points which lay in dispute. This was The History of the Dividing Line by William Byrd II. A short conclusion will attempt to set out some reasons why surveying has been largely a hidden activity, and why we need to give it a more central place in our scheme of things when we assess the development of the colonies. We still lack a comprehensive social and cultural history of surveyors – who they were, how they were recruited, how they interacted, how they learnt their craft, who employed them, and what they actually did for the majority of their working life. By far the best account of the composition of the profession and the activities of its members can be found in Sarah Bendall’s introduction to the second edition of The Dictionary of Land Surveyors. This provides a great deal of valuable quantitative data and plots the geographical spread of surveying across time. Bendall supplied interesting figures relating to the family origins of surveyors and their place of residence where established (in very many cases, this remains unknown). But of its nature this work, confined to Great Britain and Ireland, is able to supply little in its main entries beyond a listing of names and places, with some basic items of biographic information. The persons themselves remain mere individual atoms without any detectable DNA to enable us to form a general pattern. In fact, we have more thorough information about when and where the surveys were carried out than about most of the men who carried them out. For the rest, we must rely on scattered data concerning the most widely visible figures in the profession, often drawn from fugitive references in journals or letters. A very few celebrated individuals enter the margins of the story: thus the Royal Board of Ordnance employed the artist Paul Sandby, then a teenager, as a map-maker in the 1740s and appointed him as chief draughtsman for the project to map the Highlands after the 1745/6 Jacobite rebellion. William Stukeley, the famous proto-archeologist, earns a listing in the Dictionary on the score of the work he performed in connection with his excavations and his tours of historic sites. He must be one of the few clergymen and perhaps even fewer physicians who qualified for recognition in this occupational category – at least by the eighteenth century. Since the occupational status of surveyors remained hazy, with no established career path, their …