![]() It also led to new land laws and the eventual establishment of recording institutions in our country.Īnother advantage of metes and bounds survey descriptions is the information about the land. Metes and bounds gave people a way to designate, own, buy and sell property. ![]() Whenever America was still being settled by immigrants to the continent, there was no standard for measuring and recording land plots. The metes and bounds system allowed for more customized property practices that utilized localized knowledge and facilitated community development. #Metes and bounds system how to#The challenge now is figuring out how to translate the information from then to the parcel mapping needs of now. There are more modern, standardized systems for land boundaries today, but the metes and bounds plotter system continues to hang on in the form of old land surveys, deeds and other documents. What was a dependable reference point in one era may not be helpful to someone today. The problem, of course, is that trees can die, streams can dry up, roads can be moved and man made structures can fall down. They used points such as trees, boulders, streams, roads, buildings and anything else that may have been near them as a reference for property boundaries. This system, which utilizes the completely subjective interpretation of natural features and markers by a land surveyor, is by no means new, but it’s also not going away anytime soon, either.īack in the day, when surveyors lacked sophisticated measuring systems and mapping tools, metes and bounds was a reliable option. In the United States, the fingerprints for this method of surveying property can be most easily found in the states that were once the 13 original colonies. The metes and bounds system is nearly as old as land ownership itself, with evidence of it existing from as far back as Ptolemaic Egypt and the Roman Republic. 2020 Education Week Rescheduled Courses.While standardization is critical for enabling property to be understood by a larger and more distant set of buyers and creditors, customized property practices built upon localized knowledge serve other important social functions that likewise encourage development. The rich descriptions of the metes and bounds of colonial properties were customized to the preferences of American settlers and could be tailored to different types of property interests, permitting simple compliance with recording laws. Importantly, the benefits of metes and bounds were greater-and the associated costs lower-than ahistorical examination of these records would indicate. Using new archival research from the American colonial period, this Article reconstructs the forgotten history of metes and bounds within recording practice. However, historians have not yet explored the social and legal context surrounding earlier metes and bounds systems-obscuring the important role that nonstandardized property can play in stimulating growth. Metes and bounds systems have long been the subject of ridicule among scholars, and a recent wave of law-and-economics scholarship has argued that land boundaries must be easily standardized to facilitate market transactions and yield economic development. ![]() ![]() Since long before the settling of the American colonies, property boundaries were described by the “metes and bounds” method, a system of demarcation dependent on localized knowledge of movable stones, impermanent trees, and transient neighbors. ![]()
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