I just finished this article which I found fascinating.
If you ever look down from a flight and ponder why our land is split in an exact grid like pattern, here is the backstory.
Jefferson's OCD approach and Gunter's Chain are the reason.
This board seemed like the best place to share.
Why America Looks Like a Grid: The 66-Foot Tool That Shaped a Continent
If you ever look down from a flight and ponder why our land is split in an exact grid like pattern, here is the backstory.
Jefferson's OCD approach and Gunter's Chain are the reason.
This board seemed like the best place to share.
Why America Looks Like a Grid: The 66-Foot Tool That Shaped a Continent
Quote:
Edmund Gunter didn't pick 66 feet at random. He reverse-engineered it from the answer he needed. In English land measurement, an acre was a well-established unit: it was the amount of land one man with one ox could plough in one day, and it had been standardised at 43,560 square feet. The English also used the furlong (660 feet) and the mile (5,280 feet) as distance units. Gunter needed a chain that would make converting field distances to acres a matter of simple mental arithmetic.
His solution: a chain of exactly 66 feet, divided into exactly 100 links. With this tool, the mathematics become almost magical in their simplicity:
The Homestead Act of 1862 granted any citizen 160 acres of public land exactly a quarter of a standard PLSS section in exchange for five years of settlement and improvement. This only worked because the PLSS had pre-divided the entire continent into quarter-sections whose boundaries were already surveyed, staked, and legally recorded. Without the Gunter's Chain, the Homestead Act would have been unenforceable. The system that gave 160-acre farms to over 270 million settlers between 1862 and 1934 ran entirely on 66-foot arithmetic.
When frontier townships were platted for settlement, roads were typically laid along Section lines. The standard right-of-way for a public road in the PLSS states was one chain wide 66 feet. That's enough room for two wagon tracks, drainage ditches on both sides, and room to pass oncoming traffic. One-and-a-half chains (99 feet) became the standard for main commercial streets in small towns, because it allowed for parallel parking plus two travel lanes. Many American Main Streets are still exactly those widths today not because of any modern planning code, but because they follow Gunter's Chain from 1620.