Metes and Bounds
by Cynthia Owen Philip
An extraordinary thing happened to me last spring. I was admiring the old fashioned daffodils that drift across the north side of my little property when I noticed a small orange flag attached to a rotting fence post. The next day I spied two men waltzing around the same ground. Needless to say I rushed out to inquire what they were up to. "Trying to find the south boundary of your neighbor," was their reply. "We're surveyors. Work for Welch Surveying up in Red Hook."
Well, since my neighbors' south boundary is my north boundary and that property was in the process of being sold, I thought I'd better pay attention. I telephoned Welch Surveying and asked the pleasant-voiced woman who answered the phone if I could speak to the top man in the office. "I'm it," she replied. (Why oh why did I think surveying was a man's profession?) Marie Welch, as I quickly found out, has been at it for years — twenty-five to be exact. It turned out that my neighbors' house was ever so slightly on my land and in the process of solving that problem — we made a minor exchange that pleased both of us — Marie taught me a lot of fascinating things about how surveyors work.
Perhaps the most eye-popping thing I learned is that, where old parcels are concerned, surveying is not an exercise in precise measurement. A surveyor's job is, first, to determine the intent of the people who earlier divided the land by studying their deeds and maps. In the county's Real Property Tax office, these go back as to early European settlement. Then the surveyor goes out to find anything physical that corroborates what is described — pipes, pins, stone walls, remains of old trees, monuments that may have been no more than a pile of stones which have scattered with the passage of time. Often, in fact, markers were never put down; instead, the description might read "where the bear fell over the cliff," or "fifteen feet from the big willow tree."
When old boundaries do not close mathematically, surveyors must try to imagine what was in the mind of the person who commissioned the survey. This takes them to wills, letters and daybooks — whatever documentary evidence they can turn up. The route to accuracy can be tortuous — say for example, if a farmer once gave wood lots to his four children and there is no record the land was contiguous, or, sometimes, even where it is located.
The second most interesting thing I learned is that the map that accompanies the verbal description of the surveyed parcel is just an illustration; that only the verbal description has legal force. Here, clarity is of the essence. The third is that surveyors work in the horizontal: changing elevations of a piece of land are not part of the picture. Surveying is hard work, Marie emphasized, especially when information is scarce. We not only provide a legal service, she pointed out, we are required to be mathematicians, historians, psychologists, and magicians as well.
The Education of a Surveyor
Marie Welch always knew she wanted to work out of doors. Becoming a surveyor filled the bill perfectly. She studied surveying and forestry at Paul Smith's College in Saranac, New York, completing her degree in 1978. She was hired by a large Long Island firm called Baldwin and Cornelius that had a branch in Red Hook. In 1990 she bought that branch and with it got a batch of invaluable records which she still uses. Shortly afterwards she bought a brick residence on the corner of Route 199 and Orlich Road, and transformed it into an office. She has been plying her art, trade, and science there ever since.
When Marie needs more information to find the history of an elusive boundry line than the county records office yields , she delves into the extraordinarily rich papers of local surveyor Frank L. Teal which, having been miraculously saved by Clara Losee and Wint Aldrich, and are now at Red Hook's Egbert Benson Historical Society. Born in 1867, and murdered — yes, shot through the temples in 1949 at age 82 in his own home by an assailant who was never found — Teal had a career that illustrates all that a surveyor should be. Imaginative and sound, he was dedicated and meticulous, a thorough researcher and a careful verbal delineator.
Teal was also an eccentric. He lived in the house he grew up in near the Rhinebeck Aerodrome. He never improved it with running water. He persisted in heating with a wood burning iron stove and lighting with gas lamp: a little more trouble than flicking a switch, he declared, but more than worth it. He didn't install a telephone; clients either wrote to him or stopped by at his house, or caught him as he rode by on his bicycle; he refused to own a car, preferring to load his transit, steel measuring tape and papers onto his bike and pedal even to distant jobs. (It was also, I would imagine, an excellent way to get to know intimately the characteristics of the county landscape.
A photograph of Teal's workroom shows it to be a jumble of papers piled every which way on the floor and on the two huge drafting tables, three stools and a single wooden chair. (He must have been one of those image-gifted people who simply reach out and the buried paper they immediately need.) Yet he was a natty dresser. A 1927 photograph taken in a field at Glenburn, the country seat of the Dows family for whom he did a great deal of work, he is wearing a handsome three-piece tweed suit, white shirt, high collar and dark tie topped off by a fine felt fedora with a wide grosgrain band. He is tall, lithe, and lean, capable of walking through dense undergrowth at a steady six miles an hour — an elegant old time professional.
Carrying on a Tradition
Marie Welch carries on Teal's thoroughness. Her office appears infinitely tidier than the photo of Teal's workroom. Still, she shares his ability to put her hand on the exact paper she wants. When it is one from the Teal archives she knows she can use it with complete confidence. Yet she has no reluctance to use the new tools of her trade as they come along. She started out using a theodolite, steel tape and hand written field notes. Today her primary equipment is an electronic station that measures angles and distances and transmits them to a hand held computer. No more shifting back and forth from transit to pencil and paper with the errors that might occur. With surveyors Eric Gardell in Wappingers, Joseph and Wendy Berger in Poughkeepsie, and Ray Heinman in Fishkill she has bought a global positioning equipment which none of them could have afforded separately. She also can incorporate data from the Geographic Information System into her records. When the job demands it she also uses aerial photography and photogammetry.
Marie's work ranges from subdivision plotting to topographics for swimming pools, from general property transfer to construction layout to determining highway boundaries and finding out who owns abandoned roads. Her area is Northern Dutchess County. (Local surveyors joke about the huge wall separating Dutchess from Ulster County.) In addition to her busy workload, Marie is Executive Vice President of the New York State Association of Professional Land Surveyors. She is slated to become its president this year.
Marie, as you can imagine, has a host of stories to tell. One of her most interesting jobs was helping relocate a river buoy before the Coast Guard had adopted GPS. She set up two instruments about a thousand feet apart and signaled the officer who was guiding the buoy to the position where the hairlines crossed. It was a delicate, interactive, on-the-spot, operation.
One of her most entertaining jobs involved a matter of mistaken identity. Early in her career when she was surveying a drainage easement, the local sheriff came by and asked what she was up to. Apparently neighbors had reported a crazy woman slashing at trees with a huge knife in a nearby wood. He was relieved when it turned out to be only Marie, wielding the machete that is surveyors' standard equipment. She still wields one. Machetes are extremely versatile, she told me, not only can you take down underbrush and small trees — she herself has felled trees six inches in diameter — but you can pry up dead logs, tin cans and dirt when you're looking for old monuments. What you have to do is keep them sharp.
Whatever the job, Marie's goal is to be accurate rather than merely precise. Inspired by Teal and her own professionalism, she doesn't want to leave behind any problems that might challenge future surveyors.
