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length of a 40

F

farmerwithmutt

Well-known Member
I always thought a 40 was a quarter mile or 1320 feet .I was wrong with adjustments that they make for the curvature of the earth I have three 40 acre parcels north to south the top one is only 1319 feet at the top and the next two are 1326.51 feet and the next is 1326.31 feet .not much of a problem until you find out your fence is 6 ft off the survey mark.
 
I have to think about this, but that does not make sense, the furthest south should be the longest.
 
Your right the south end is 1326 and the North is 1319.adjustments are made in the north west corners of a township
 
A true 40 is a quarter mile by quarter mile. Sounds like your parcels are in a correctional mile. Where I am at, the square miles will run true for a few miles and then there will be a mile that is considered to be a correctional mile to true things up. The measurements and number of acres in the correctional mile will be untrue (long or short) not just in distance but acres too.
 
Correctionville Iowa, has a jog in its main road, right in the middle of town, where the "correction" is made.
 
There is a reason Auctioneers and Attorneys list parcels on land auctions as X acres more or less.

From what I have looked at in plat books the correction parcel is usually on the northern and western edges of townships.

Also keep in mind roads and ditches are taken out of the measurements also.
 
Knew a guy that had a house on the blank side of a "T" intersection where the road went over about 40 ft. for a correction.

People kept missing the stop sign and driving right into the side of his house. He had some large boulders hauled in and placed along the side of his property and nobody ever ran into the boulders. Guess they couldn't see a house, but they could see the boulders?
 
The north-south property lines are supposed to both point to true north. Which means all parcels are slightly trapezoidal. The correction lines ensure that all sections are fairly close to 640 acres.

Which brings up a point I've always wondered about: In Ontario the section lines are laid out diagonally with respect to true north. How the heck did they correct that?
 
You orta read some the property descriptions for those of us who use the metes and bounds system.
 
That's why roads or intersections sometimes have odd little jogs in them???

We always figured all the old German's and Norwegians in the area tipped a few too many while building roads!
 
Michigan's base line was surveyed by two parties, one started in the west and headed east, one started in the east and headed west, they were about 900 feet apart when they were supposed to meet up. I have been told there are entire sections and nearly one township missing on the Michigan grid. I have heard tales of folks buying deer hunting land up north only to find they bought a legal description that doesn't have any land corresponding to it.
 
I don't doubt that some of the northern townships are missing sections, but that wouldn't be because of a 900 foot error on the baseline (which we call Eight Mile Road around here). It would be because it's about 500 miles from the southern Michigan border to the northernmost point of the UP.

The further north you go, the more rapidly the lines of longitude converge. At the equator, a section will be almost perfectly square. But at the north pole, your "section" will be pie-shaped and will be much smaller than 640 acres. At the north pole, you will only get 6.28 pie-shaped parcels one mile wide at the base and one mile tall. Each of these "sections" will be half a square mile. The UP and the northern lower penininsula are north of the 45th parallel, halfway between the equator and north pole. Although convergence of the lines of longitude is not as pronounced here as at the poles, it is still significant. The townships will be increasingly trapezoidal as you go north, so it's going to be difficult to get 36 evenly-sized sections out of a northern township.
 
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