Eastwest Surveyors

[Anjali Reyome]

When it comes to buying, selling or developing property, it's best to have as much information as possible. When you need up-to-date info about your land, turn to East To West Surveying, Inc. We provide professional surveying services at affordable rates.

Whether you want to sell your house or build a subdivision, we can define your property boundaries and create a detailed report on your lot.

Call today to schedule an appointment with an experienced land surveyor. We serve clients within 150 miles of Tyler, TX.

East To West Surveying offers a variety of professional surveying services in the Tyler, TX area. Our land surveyors use state-of-the-art equipment and can handle any surveying job efficiently.
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Boundary surveying services

Do you own a property in the Tyler, TX area that you'd like to develop into a subdivision? Hire the experts at East To West Surveying to survey your property and map out your development. We can even perform a topographic survey and stake out each individual lot and driveway. Find out why we're a preferred local surveying company.

People are generally unaware of the prolific works of numerous Irish land surveyors of the 16th to 19th centuries. The most comprehensive study of this activity is found in the late John Andrews book called Plantation Acres, out of print.

There was a great abundance of work in this period largely resulting from the various plantations and the establishment and growth of large estates. These estates were run as businesses, large & small. It was necessary for each to establish what their boundaries were, their acreages both in total but also the areas of each plot of land. This information combined with a valuation of the land quality was used to derive the rent set for each tenant. It also formed the basis of the taxation system with a cess tax payable by the estate owner to the local county grand juries (the modern County Council). And of course in due course, for the sale and disposal of estates.

The heyday of this work was in the latter 1700s and early 1800s with several hundred local land surveyors and valuers offering their services. In early days they came from England looking for work but there were soon many Irish practitioners like Lawrence Nowlan or Peter Callan. Then also came a continental style with the likes of Bernard Scal and John Rocque.

The latter end of this period saw the more accomplished surveyors like Bald & Larkin producing county size maps but all this endeavor soon came to a shuddering halt with the government Six Inch survey and valuation, of which more anon.

Maryland and Pennsylvania both claimed the land between the 39th and 40th parallels according to the charters granted to each colony. The 'Three Lower Counties' (Delaware) along Delaware Bay moved into the Penn sphere of settlement, and later became the Delaware Colony, a satellite of Pennsylvania.

In 1732 the proprietary governor of Maryland, Charles Calvert, 5th Baron Baltimore, signed an agreement with William Penn's sons which drew a line somewhere in between, and also renounced the Calvert claim to Delaware. But later Lord Baltimore claimed that the document he signed did not contain the terms he had agreed to, and refused to put the agreement into effect. Beginning in the mid-1730s, violence erupted between settlers claiming various loyalties to Maryland and Pennsylvania. The border conflict between Pennsylvania and Maryland would be known as Cresap's War.

The issue was unresolved until the Crown intervened in 1760, ordering Frederick Calvert, 6th Baron Baltimore to accept the 1732 agreement. As part of the settlement, the Penns and Calverts commissioned the English team of Charles Mason and Jeremiah Dixon to survey the newly established boundaries between the Province of Pennsylvania, the Province of Maryland, Delaware Colony and parts of Colony and Old Dominion of Virginia.

Mason and Dixon's actual survey line began to the south of Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, and extended from a benchmark east to the Delaware River and west to what was then the boundary with western Virginia.

The surveyors also fixed the boundary between Delaware and Pennsylvania and the approximately north-south portion of the boundary between Delaware and Maryland. Most of the Delaware-Pennsylvania boundary is a circular arc, and the Delaware-Maryland boundary does not run truly north-south because it was intended to bisect the Delmarva Peninsula rather than follow a meridian.

The Maryland-Pennsylvania boundary is an east-west line with an approximate mean latitude of 39 43' 20" N (Datum WGS 84). In reality, the east-west Mason-Dixon line is not a true line in the geometric sense, but is instead a series of many adjoining lines, following a path between latitude 39 43' 15" N and 39 43' 23" N; a surveyor or mapper might call it an approximate rhumb line. As such, the line approximates a segment of a small circle upon the surface of the (also approximately) spherical Earth. An observer standing on such a line and viewing its path toward an unobstructed horizon would perceive it to bend away from his line of sight, an effect of the inequality between the amount of curvature to his left and right. Among parallels of latitude, only the Equator is a great circle and would not exhibit this effect.

The Mason-Dixon Line was marked by stones every mile and "crownstones" every five miles, using stone shipped from England. The Maryland side says (M) and the Delaware and Pennsylvania sides say (P). Crownstones include the two coats-of-arms. Today, while a number of the original stones are missing or buried, many are still visible, resting on public land and protected by iron cages.

Mason and Dixon confirmed earlier survey work which delineated Delaware's southern boundary from the Atlantic Ocean to the "Middle Point" stone (along what is today known as the Transpeninsular Line). They proceeded nearly due north from this to the Pennsylvania border.

Later the line was marked in places by additional benchmarks and survey markers. The lines have been resurveyed several times over the centuries without substantive changes to Mason and Dixon's work. The stones may be a few to a few hundred feet east or west of the point Mason and Dixon thought they were; in any event, the line drawn from stone to stone forms the legal boundary.

According to Dave Doyle at the National Geodetic Survey, part of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, the common corner of Pennsylvania, Maryland, and Delaware, at The Wedge is marked by Boundary Monument #87. The marker "MDP Corner" dates from 1935 and is offset on purpose.

Visitors to the tripoint are strongly encouraged to first obtain permission from the nearest landowner, or use the path from the arc corner monument which is bordered by Delaware parkland most of the way, and Pennslyvania parkland the entire way.

The line was established to end a boundary dispute between the British colonies of Maryland and Pennsylvania/Delaware. Due to incorrect maps and confusing legal descriptions, the royal charters of the three colonies overlapped. Maryland was granted the territory north of the Potomac River/Watkins Pointup to the fortieth parallel; Pennsylvania was granted land extending northward from a point "12 miles north of New Castle Towne," which is located south of the fortieth parallel. The most serious problem was that the Maryland claim would put Philadelphia, which became the major city in Pennsylvania, within Maryland. A protracted legal dispute between the Calvert family, which controlled Maryland, and the Penn family, which controlled Pennsylvania and the "Three Lower Counties" (Delaware), was ended by the 1750 ruling that the boundary should be fixed as follows:

The disputants engaged an expert British team, astronomer Charles Mason and surveyor Jeremiah Dixon, to survey what became known as the Mason-Dixon Line. It cost the Calverts of Maryland and the Penns of Pennsylvania 3,512/9 s to have 244 miles surveyed with such accuracy. To them the money was well spent, for in a new country there was no other way of establishing ownership.

The Mason-Dixon line is made up of four segments corresponding to the terms of the settlement: Tangent Line, North Line, Arc Line, and 39 43' N parallel. The most difficult task was fixing the Tangent Line, as they had to confirm the accuracy of the Transpeninsular Line mid-point and the Twelve-Mile Circle, determine the tangent point along the circle, then actually survey and monument the border. They then surveyed the North and Arc Lines. They did this work between 1763 and 1767. This actually left a small wedge of land in dispute between Delaware and Pennsylvania until 1921.

In April 1765, Mason and Dixon began their survey of the more famous Maryland-Pennsylvania line. They were commissioned to run it for a distance of five degrees of longitude west from the Delaware River, fixing the western boundary of Pennsylvania (see the entry for Yohogania County). However, in October 1767 at Dunkard Creek near Mount Morris, Pennsylvania, nearly 244 miles (392 km) west of the Delaware, a group of Native Americans forced them to quit their progress. In 1784, surveyors David Rittenhouse and Andrew Ellicott and their crew completed the survey of the Mason-Dixon line to the southwest corner of Pennsylvania, five degrees from the Delaware River. Other surveyors continued west to the Ohio River. The section of the line between the southwestern corner of Pennsylvania and the river is the county line between Marshall and Wetzel counties, West Virginia.

The Missouri Compromise of 1820 created the political conditions which made the Mason-Dixon Line important to the history of slavery. It was during the Congressional debates leading up to the compromise that the term "Mason-Dixon line" was first used to designate the entire boundary between free states and slave states.

On November 14, 1963, during the bicentennial of the Mason-Dixon Line, U.S. President John F. Kennedy opened a newly completed section of Interstate 95 where it crossed the Maryland-Delaware border. It was his last public appearance before the one 8 days later in Dallas, Texas, where he was assassinated. The Delaware Turnpike and the Maryland portion of the new road were each later designated as the John F. Kennedy Memorial Highway.

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