Surveying Saskatchewan

As a kid, I could never figure out what quarter-sections were. Eventually I learned it was equivalent to 160 acres, but why was it a quarter-section? A quarter-section of what? And where did that long string of numbers and letters used to describe it come from?

Well, better late than never, they say, and now that I’m working on a history of surveyors in Saskatchewan, I think I’m beginning to figure it out.

The earliest European settlements in North America naturally tended to occupy blocks of land about six miles square, with public buildings (a school, a church, a meeting house) at its center and farms around that. Within a block that size, every place is within reasonable walking distance of every other place.

After the American Revolution, the United States Congress adopted a method of allocating lands in the western part of the new country that divided the land into townships, each six miles square and consisting of 36 mile-square sections. Each section was further divided into individual holdings of 160 acres each.

When the time came, almost a hundred years later, for the fledgling Canadian government to do the same, it ended up adopting (with slight modifications) pretty much the same plan.

The resulting late-19th-century Dominion Land Survey gave rural Saskatchewan the grid-like pattern that defines so much of what we take for granted today.

That grid consists of six-mile-square townships, created by a series of east-west township lines, each six miles apart, and north-south range lines, likewise six miles apart. Numbering of these townships proceeds north from the 49th parallel and west from a specific meridian.

The First Meridian was set at 97º27’28.4” (97 degrees, 27 minutes, 28.4 seconds) west longitude (essentially the end of the telegraph line from Chicago, which meant the furthest west the surveyors could get the accurate time necessary to pinpoint a precise longitude). The Second Meridian is at 102º W., just inside the Saskatchewan-Manitoba Border in the south and becoming the border further north, the Third Meridian is at 106º W., and the Fourth, the Saskatchewan-Alberta Border, is at 110º W.

Township 3-8-W2, then, is the six-square-mile block of land three townships up from the border and eight to the west of the Second Meridian.

Because the world is round, meridians converge as they approach the North Pole. (Township 17-19-W2, the 17th township north of the border and the 19th west of the Second Meridian, which includes the city of Regina, is theoretically 95 feet narrower at the north end than at the south.)

To deal with this unavoidable reality, “correction lines” were introduced every four townships going north. These keep all the townships pretty much the same size: the townships are simply jogged west so that a township immediately north of a correction line does not line up directly with the one underneath it. The first jog west of a meridian is about 225 feet, and the correction increases by about that much again for every township you move west, until you reach the next meridian. (The range lines just to the east of a meridian therefore disappear as you move further north–that’s what happens at the Saskatchewan-Manitoba border).

Within each township, 640-acre sections are numbered 1 to 36, beginning in the southeast corner and continuing east to west (1 to 6), then, in the next row north, west to east (7 to 12), then east to west (13 to 18), and so on. The 160-acre quarter-sections, the parcels of land given out as homesteads to new settlers, are identified by compass direction (NW, NE, SW or SE). So a particular quarter-section might be labeled NE15-6-20-W2.

While battling bugs, blizzard, prairie fires and mud, the surveyors place monuments at section and township corners: initially wooden posts at section corners and iron posts at township corners. (Many other monument types were also used over the years.) They also took copious, detailed notes of everything from topography to natural resources.

Saskatchewan is one of the few state or provinces in the world with no natural boundaries whatsoever. It is, literally, a giant surveyor’s monument: a monument to the importance of the science of surveying to Canada’s growth and development.

Permanent link to this article: https://edwardwillett.com/2008/07/surveying-saskatchewan/

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