Township and Range System

The U.S. Public Land Survey System is a township and range pattern of land division that was imposed across the United States west of Pennsylvania's western boundary in territory deemed “public domain” as the early nation expanded to the Pacific Ocean. It is the foundation of a cadastral survey that defines boundaries for land ownership. It forms a gargantuan checkerboard of surveyed grid-squares defining millions of parcels of land that served literally as the framework for colonizing and developing the vast new country. Reminiscent of Roman land centuriation, at least in its geometry, the American system was first proposed by Thomas Jefferson, who saw it as the most democratic way to create a great agrarian commonwealth of independent farmers based on freehold land ownership. Neither he nor anyone else at the time foresaw the rugged Western terrain that the system would confront.

The system had its origin in the Land Ordinance of 1785, which provided for the systematic survey and monumentation of public domain lands, and the Northwest Ordinance of 1787, which established a rectangular survey system designed to sell and grant federal lands to private owners. From a modest beginning in the Seven Ranges area of Eastern Ohio, the system grew to encompass most of the nation's territory and to stamp the American landscape with its unique, mechanistic imprint of seeming dominance over the continent's natural environment. The chief exclusions from this federal system of land division are portions of Ohio that were surveyed and alienated from the public domain before the system was fully institutionalized; land in Texas, which remained under state control as a condition of annexation; lands granted to private interests under Spanish, French, and Mexican dominion prior to American sovereignty; Native American reservations; and certain high-mountain areas in the Far West that have never been officially subdivided.

Earth's curvature required that the extension of the system be tied to periodic benchmarks of longitude and latitude, known as prime meridians, and baselines defined for specific regions, so that the theoretically flat two-dimensional grid pattern could be laid out on the spherical surface with necessary corrections made at intervals. The basic areal unit is the survey township, a square 6 miles on each side, comprising 36 square miles, each square-mile subunit (640 acres in area) being called a section. Within townships, sections are numbered sequentially from the northeast corner to the southeast corner. Townships have distinctive locational identities, expressed as so many townships north or south of a particular baseline and so many ranges east or west of a particular prime meridian—downtown Chicago, for example, lies in T39N.R14E, that is, the 39th township north of the Centralia Base Line and the 14th range east of the third principal meridian.

Each section of land may be further subdivided into quarter sections (160 acres) and quarter-quarter sections (40 acres), the latter being one of the smallest standard land units sold or granted to private interests, apart from the irregular fractional sections formed by intersecting watercourses, coastlines, survey correction lines, or, in the rare cases of government townsites, townsite lots. Recipients of land in the township and range system have generally been free to select land parcels in almost any geometrical combination of subunits within the checkerboard consistent with purchase and payment requirements that have varied with federal land policy over time. Every discrete land unit within this national survey system is described by a unique geographical reference system, expressible in alphanumeric shorthand. Land descriptions are read from the smallest division to the largest (e.g., the NW1/4 of the NW1/4 of Sec. 9 of T39N.R14E). Such geometrically simple description facilitated land reconnaissance and purchase by intending pioneers and distant purchasers alike; it has greatly simplified the registration of billions of land parcels in this continental-scale nation and constitutes the basis of most land transfers and ownership today. Since 1785, almost 1.5 billion acres have been surveyed into townships and sections.

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