Maps and Atlas Collection
Surveyor's Notes and Plats for Wisconsin
The Northwest Ordinance of 1787 included provisions for surveying and selling United States public lands. The US General Office was established in 1812 to carry out these responsibilities. Under the supervision of a Surveyor-General, teams of surveyors traversed the land, dividing it into six mile squares called towns and subdividing these towns into 36 mile-square sections of 640 acres. The surveyors transcribed their survey notes into small notebooks which included information on the quality of the land, the nature of the vegetation and the topography, including swamps, rapids, bluffs, and signs of human habitation such as trails, Indian villages, mines and cultivated fields.
The survey of Wisconsin took place between 1832 and 1866. The completed notebooks for Wisconsin surveys were taken to regional Surveyor General's offices in St. Louis or Dubuque where clerks and draftsmen transcribed them into maps called survey plats for every town. One copy of each map was sent to Washington, one kept at the regional office, and one sent to the local land office. The local land offices were the focus of the entire system, as this was where settlers and speculators came to choose and buy land. The survey plats provided vital information that helped buyers make their purchases.
The first local land offices in Wisconsin were established at Mineral Point and Green Bay in 1834. Eventually 14 offices served Wisconsin. The last Wisconsin land office at Wausau closed in 1925, completing an era of surveys and sales that extended over 90 years.
Microfilm copies of the Wisconsin surveyors' notes and manuscript copies of the survey plats are housed in the Archives Division of the Wisconsin Historical Society. The original notes and original survey plats plus additional Wisconsin local land office records are held by the Office of the Commissioners of Public Lands for Wisconsin. These notes and surveys form a unique resource for recreating Wisconsin's pre-settlement landscape, identifying Native American cultural sites, and tracing the earliest signs of settlement.
Images of the surveyors' notes and the survey plats can be found at http://digicoll.library.wisc.edu/SurveyNotes/.
Additional Resources
For more information and sample images, visit U.S. General Land Office Surveyors' Field Notes. This article originally appeared in Exchange, a newsletter published by the Wisconsin Historical Society's Office of Local History. (Volume 36, Number 3, 1994) and focuses on the value of this resource for studying community history.
Wisconsin Land Economic Inventory
The University of Wisconsin has made landcover maps of the Wisconsin Land Economic Inventory (Bordner Survey) available at its Ecology and Natural Resources site. The Wisconsin Land Economic Inventory is a resurvey of almost the entire state of Wisconsin performed in the 1930s to assess land cover and land usage. It is an excellent source for comparing and contrasting changes in vegetation and land use 100 years aftrer the beginning of the US General Land Office Surveys in Wisconsin.
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