This One's For Guy!

[RednekF350]

I am a licensed land surveyor and I receive several professional journals throughout the year including a monthly called American Surveyor.
This month's edition has an article about early meridian stones in Nantucket that were used as a reference for true north and as a means of measuring annual declination thereafter. They were installed around 1840 and most still survive today.
They are a little too easy to find for Guy as most appear to be in the town's streets and open lawns.
Looking for "lost" monuments is part of what I do and it is the most interesting part of the job.
Over the last year or so I have helped Guy expand his data resources by giving him State Geodetic contact info, monument tie sheets and some coordinate conversion information.
He and his daughter have done an incredible job as laypeople finding monuments armed only with coordinates and a handheld GPS.
I can think of several surveyors that couldn't find 1/3 of what Guy has found using every available piece of equipment and techno-resource available.
Here is the link to the article. Enjoy.http://www.theamericansurveyor.com/PDF/TheAmericanSurveyor_Strelnitski-MeridanStones_May2006.pdf
Scott

 

[Teegate]

Scott,

Thanks for the kind words, and the great article.

My wife's parents are going to Nantucket on Monday, so I will pass this on to them and maybe they can get some photo's of them.

And I hope the two men decide to remove the white stake in the photo with the dog. Too many times I have found survey tape or steel posts in the ground and the stone is gone. One of the most important stones in the pines has a steel post next to it now from a recent property survey. I questioned that but the person I talked to did not seem to mind it there.

BTW, Scott, do you use the program called "SolidWorks" at your company? We have that at work and one of the employees who went to the class said many of the people in it were surveyors. I have access to that program and can if it is possible now make survey maps. I am looking into how to do that. I hope to have all of the stones I have found on a survey map one day.

Guy

 

[RednekF350]

We never heard of Solidworks .
We are currently transitioning all of our CAD drafting software to Landesktop which operates with Autocad. It is supposed to be a great system and compatible with our data collector but I won't be using it much since I am not a draftsman.
I still do most of my calculating on an old 386 using a program called COGO PC.
I also have a program made by Simplicity that is good for plotting.
I can create .dxf files that a draftsman can import and use to start drawing surveys.
My handheld HP-41 calculator with the survey chip is still my most powerful tool in the field.
Scott

 

[Teegate]

Scott,

I forgot to mention that a few weeks back bobpbx, Ed and I were on Tuckerton road and Bob found this.

http://www.njpinebarrens.com/teegate/main.php/download/1694-1/IMG_6862.JPG

http://www.njpinebarrens.com/teegate/main.php/download/1690-1/1_001.JPG

I checked your Jenkins-Oswego tie sheet and it appears to be PT20884 or at least in that area. There was a recent controlled burn which exposed it. There are at least 4 others in that area for me to also find.

Guy

 

[bobpbx]

Guy, you know the survey discs they put in on Lacey Road? I found 2 guys shooting a line from one to the other 3 weeks ago. They said they were checking the calibration of their instrument against these as they are known standards that were put in and checked by very precise scopes.

 

[Teegate]

Guy, you know the survey discs they put in on Lacey Road? I found 2 guys shooting a line from one to the other 3 weeks ago. They said they were checking the calibration of their instrument against these as they are known standards that were put in and checked by very precise scopes.

Cool! That is what they are for. If you see anyone again ask them if they know of some interesting stones

Guy

 

[RednekF350]

The newest high accuracy baseline for instrument calibration is along the easterly right of way of route 54 in Folsom starting at the intersection of Mays Landing road and running south towards the Egg Harbor River crossing.
It was finished last year.
I went to a seminar in January at the Savoy in Vineland where they did a Powerpoint presentation on the work that went into establishing the baseline
Pretty impressive equipment that the USGS brings in to assist the NJ Geodetic Survey Offfice.
Most of the monument pairs set in remote areas are used for establishing a state plane grid bearing and affording the ability to transfer state plane coordinates from the monuments to other areas.
With the advent of high accuracy GPS units in surveying, the monuments are becoming less important and are not being replaced when they are destroyed.
I just used a pair of NJGS monuments for vertical and horizontal positioning on Monday on Burlington Ave. in Beverly that were set in 1936 and they are in pristine condition.
Scott

 

[Teegate]

I am a licensed land surveyor and I receive several professional journals throughout the year including a monthly called American Surveyor.
This month's edition has an article about early meridian stones in Nantucket that were used as a reference for true north and as a means of measuring annual declination thereafter. They were installed around 1840 and most still survive today.
They are a little too easy to find for Guy as most appear to be in the town's streets and open lawns.

Scott,

As I mentioned in my first post on this thread, my in-laws were going to Nantucket that weekend on a trip and I mentioned I would tell them about it so they could look for it. Well.....

Thanks for the post.

Guy