Term: forty (survey)
Definition: a quarter of a quarter-section, containing 40 acres; the smallest unit of land sold by the U.S. government; when logging companies harvested outside the bounds of designated quarter-sections in the late-19th century, observers referred sarcastically to them as "round forties."
[Source: Wyman, Mark. The Wisconsin Frontier (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1998). More information about the G.L.O. survey in Wisconsin and digital images of the surveyors" original field notes are at http://libtext.library.wisc.edu/SurveyNotes/]
