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Original Madison Plat Map, 1836

Original plat map of the town of Madison. View the original source document: WHI 38589

Land has always been a desirable commodity. Records of land ownership date back 5,000 years to the time of Sumerian clay tablets. Surveying — measuring and describing the landscape so it can be owned, transferred, and taxed — is one of the pillars on which western civilization rests.

As soon as the United States wrested control of the Wisconsin landscape from its original inhabitants in the 1830s, it was surveyed and mapped into parcels that settlers could buy. Teams of surveyors hiked across the land, measuring it into six-mile squares called townships. They then subdivided each town into 36-mile-square sections of roughly 640 acres. The surveyors kept notes on the land cover of each section, and their notebooks were used to draw township maps. These were kept in local land offices to help sell the land to new owners. The surveyors' original notebooks and the township maps are available online.

Survey work was difficult, since the survey parties had to follow the compass relentlessly over hills, through swamps, and into forests as well as across sunny meadows. In his seven years as a surveyor, John Brink traversed much of southern Wisconsin, as well as parts of Iowa and Michigan. In his memoir he tells of his encounters with Indians and bureaucrats, a close escape during the Black Hawk War, meeting early miners such as Henry Gratiot, and how Lake Geneva got its name.

The survey of Wisconsin began in 1832 on the Wisconsin-Illinois border about 10 miles east of the Mississippi, and it concluded in 1866 in the northwoods. The first land offices opened in 1834 in Mineral Point and Green Bay. As settlement proceeded, land offices in the southern parts of the state closed and new ones opened in more remote areas. Several versions of Samuel Morrison's 1835 "Map of the Surveyed Part of Wisconsin Territory: Compiled from Public Surveys as Returned to the Surveyor General's Office" in the Society's collections have been enlarged by hand to show the progress of the survey during the 1830s.

Some surveyors worked not on the rectangular survey, but rather on a more local scale, laying out streets or railroad lines. Turning Points also includes the recollections of the man who laid out downtown Madison in 1837 and the diary of another, who plotted the route of a rail line from Portage to La Crosse in 1857.

One of the most serious problems for surveyors was magnetic deviation — the distortion of their compass by deposits of iron in the ground. Joshua Hatheway nearly abandoned the survey of downtown Madison for this reason. A solar compass in the Museum's collections, invented by William Austin Burt in 1835, did not depend on magnetic readings. It soon became the standard for surveying areas with high concentrations of iron ore all over the country. The compass featured here was used to survey land in what is known today as Wisconsin, Minnesota, Iowa and Missouri during the 1840s and '50s, including the establishment of the Iowa-Missouri line in 1852.