The late and renowned Newport attorney Harry Spanos used to love to tell of interesting items he found while researching real estate titles in the Sullivan County land records. A favorite was the property boundary described as “Beginning at the oak tree where the cow had the calf.”
Until the 1960s, much of the Upper Valley’s rural land hadn’t been surveyed since the region’s townships were laid out in six-mile squares by New Hampshire provincial Gov. Benning Wentworth down in Portsmouth back in the early 1760s. He granted them to what were called proprietors — essentially speculators and mostly based in the province of Connecticut.
Those proprietors then marked off lots, usually of about 100 acres, to sell to people willing to bushwhack up the Connecticut River valley and try to clear forest and launch settlements. Surveyors were sent ahead to establish lot boundaries, leading to the creation of maps that would become the basis for all rights of property ownership.
For the ensuing two-plus centuries, those lots would be merged, divided and reconfigured in hundreds of different ways, but the reference points were always traceable to Benning Wentworth and his dealings with speculators. Efforts would be made, of course, along the way to research the chains of ownership and undertake more precise surveys using compass and measuring rod or chain.
But, until modern times, land was regularly transferred to new owners with no formal survey being undertaken. Veteran surveyors in the region agree that vast reaches of the Upper Valley — mostly forest land — have never been surveyed since the original colonial grants were issued.
Hundreds of miles of boundary lines have existed on what amounts to a handshake with adjacent owners simply accepting them as they believe them to be. And the acreage within the lines has generally been assumed to be correct even with no survey to prove it. This gave rise to the qualifier “more or less” which could literally mean 200 acres or 20 acres but not worth fussing over.
Norrie Parr, retired longtime Grafton County forester, agrees there’s much land that’s never been surveyed, as well as some that’s been surveyed but the survey has never been officially recorded with the county register of deeds.
“There are also quite a few parcels that have been mapped by a forester, and that owners often consider satisfactory, but that type of map is not a survey by a registered land surveyor backed up by research of deeds of the abutting land and the other requirements of a formal survey,” Parr points out.
A veteran professional surveyor, Byron Kidder of Bradford, Vt., agrees there’s still a lot of land that has never been surveyed in two centuries, but pressure for change began in the early 1960s.
“You started having people from down country coming in and buying land, and they wanted to see on a map exactly what they were getting. Then the banks were getting stricter on property they were financing, and wanted to know just what was being put up for security on loans,” Kidder observes.
“Then a big part was the subdivision of land. Subdivisions were having to go through town subdivision laws, and there was more and more where people were cutting off pieces for house lots. To get the okay, you had to have a legal survey to present and one that could be recorded.”
Every boundary is shared by two owners, and, if there’s disagreement, the survey is the only way to settle the issue. That means the surveyor has to research title documents for both sides of the line. Kidder notes that sometimes the documents will fail to give a clear picture and if the owners can’t negotiate a resolution satisfactory to both, the matter heads to court.
Chris Rollins, another veteran of the Upper Valley survey business based in Plainfield, will say that researching titles is often more difficult than the work in the field getting bearings and distances. That’s because so many deeds were drawn by laypeople and were written in what might be called a colloquial voice.
As recently as 1971, a Plainfield character named Vernon Hood would, for a $10 bill, draw up a warranty deed. He had a preprinted blank deed form he’d roll into his Royal portable typewriter and his customer would give him the names and price information for the document. Then Hood would ask for the description of the property being conveyed.
That description could be whatever his client offered. It might be just a general “the Old Jacob Smith place” or “the Williams pasture” with “so-called” often tossed in after the name of the subject parcel for good measure. A more detailed description might be presented that could say “bounded by land now or formerly of Joseph Bryant, Eben Dunlap and Reuben Ford.”
For generations, such vague descriptions weren’t much of a concern, because neighbors and local officials all understood where and what was being portrayed. Sellers and buyers likely as not knew all the parties involved and generally where boundaries were. It was an agrarian culture where people farmed and logged nearby.
Hood’s handiwork would be duly witnessed and sworn to, and the deed could be taken to the county registry of deeds for recording; it was as simple as that. Vermont and New Hampshire land records are maintained differently — by the town in the Green Mountain State, and by the county across the river—but quirky practices of transferring title to land were common to both jurisdictions.
Another challenging dimension for title researchers is that, until the advent of the typewriter, instruments were written by hand, in script. The further back in time, the harder it can be to decipher the words.
Attorneys at law eventually would dominate the conduct of title searches and deed preparation. Virtually every transfer of real property today will be overseen by lawyers. But many a surveyor will still say that doesn’t automatically mean the process will be free of screwups.
The surveying field was a wide-open craft until licensure laws were adopted in both states in the late 1960s. Some old guard practitioners fought the change bitterly, arguing they didn’t need any higher authority looking over their shoulders and investigating their procedures. But reform would come when an engineer-turned surveyor named Paul Bigelow in an address at a gathering of Vermont surveyors in 1967 called out his colleagues on a variety of fronts, including careless omissions of information on the basis of bearings used (grid north, true north, magnetic north, or ‘assumed’ north?), failure to set permanent monuments, failure to follow standards for achieving data precision and much more.
Bigelow’s speech was later published the form of a widely circulated monograph titled “The Bigelow Papers” that remains a strong critique of the profession and a detailed guide for how surveyors should perform.
The profession today is aging in both states and practitioners in the field often express concern for the lack of younger people to carry the profession forward. Technology has revolutionized the game, with ever-growing integration of GPS, CAD and other sophisticated tools like AI.
The University of New Hampshire’s two-year civil technology program turned out many of the region’s currently practicing surveyors, but that program was dropped a few years back. Prospective entrants to the field from UNH now must obtain a four-year civil engineering degree.
With a tightening body of practitioners and growing complexity of survey technology, costs of services have risen sharply. The owner of one of the Upper Valley’s larger privately held holdings, more than 1,500 unsurveyed acres, was recently quoted a price of $65,000 for a survey.
No discussion of old vs. modern aspects of the land surveying field can be complete without looking at tax maps, which are now required for municipal governments that collect real estate taxes. The widespread introduction of tax mapping forced many local governments to make a huge leap into modern technology.
In 1972, the New Hampshire State Tax Commission found that Plainfield’s property assessments were way out of whack and ordered a complete townwide revaluation. The appraisers arrived in town and first-off asked to see the town’s tax maps. “Huh, what maps?” incredulous town officials responded. The state crew obtained USDA aerial photos of the town, placed mylar over them and asked property owners one by one to come and show where they believed their property lines were.
At the end of the exercise, all that remained unaccounted for were some tiny wedges of land created by highway construction, an island in the Connecticut River and a piece of about 100 acres that nobody seemed able to claim. A lot more research at the deeds and probate registries revealed that the parcel was once owned by the town. At some point long ago, it had been deeded away, but the deed had never been recorded. More research showed it belonged to a local farmer by inheritance, and, after things got straightened out, he would say he made more money that day than he had in 10 years milking cows.
The town’s tax maps today contain detailed ownership, valuation and more relevant information, all in a searchable computer format any citizen can look up.
For many years a contributor to the Valley News, Steve Taylor lives in Meriden.
