by the same person at one time was a remarkable feature of life in Virginia. A surveyorship was considered to be sufficiently valuable to make it a desirable addition to the lucrative offices filled by the leading landowners of each community.
When the surveyor received from the person who wished to sue out a patent to public land in the county in which the surveyor resided, the certificate of head rights given by the clerks in the Secretary’s office, he proceeded to make a survey of such an unappropriated tract as the intended patentee selected. In the beginning, and throughout the whole of the seventeenth century, the far greater area of lands obtained by public grants was situated immediately upon the larger streams,[1] not only because in general these lands were the most fertile, but also because they alone offered an open highway to market. It was the custom of the surveyor to adopt the banks of a river or creek as his base. The interest of the owner of the new plantation extended into the stream to the furthest limits of the lowest ebb-tide, and no one, unless he had gotten the consent of the proprietor, could angle or haul a seine in these bounds without committing a trespass.[2] From either end of the base line the surveyor drew a line at right angles, which was carried to the length of a statute mile as a rule.[3] At the
- ↑ Virginia’s Cure, p. 4, Force’s Historical Tracts, vol. III; Public Good without Private Interest, p. 9. The same disposition was shown even in the cases in which the area of ground to be taken up was enormous. Thus in 1689, Fitzhugh proposed to buy from the agent of Culpeper in the Northern Neck, a body of land covering a hundred thousand acres, but one of the conditions of the purchase was to be that the tract should not extend back from the river on which it was situated further than five miles. Letters of William Fitzhugh, Proposal to Secretary Spencer, April, 1689.
- ↑ Hening’s Statutes, vol. II, p. 456.
- ↑ I am indebted for most of the details which follow immediately, to an admirable paper, written, presumably, by Governor Tazewell, one of the ablest and most learned lawyers produced by Virginia, and published in the Va. Hist. Register, vol. II, No. 4, p. 190.
