15 Professional Land Surveyors of Oregon | www.plso.org Book Review Measuring America: How the United States Was Shaped by the Greatest Land Sale in History Reviewed by Renee Clough, PLS, PE, AICP Surveyors credit Thomas Jefferson with the PLSS system. Please don’t attack me for heresy but I’ve always found this a bit unbelievable. Thomas Jefferson had an enormous amount of political responsibility—how could he have had time to also develop something as complex as the PLSS? Now that my dad, John Minor, is retired, he has had the time to make a lot of friends on surveyor message boards. I asked if he could get their opinions on how much involvement Thomas Jefferson had in the PLSS creation. One respondent suggested that Measuring America would be a good resource. It turns out that it was. While not entirely or directly about my question, it answered my question and other questions I didn’t even know I had. The start of the book discusses the invention of privately owned property and even the invention of uniformmeasurements. I had no idea that there was so much variety in measurements so recently in history or that the development of standardized measurements was so extremely controversial. Once the book sets the stage with this background, it moves into a discussion of how the PLSS was developed and the hiccups of early implementation. Around half way through the book, the PLSS discussion is over and the author moves into a discussion of the impacts of the PLSS on things like design of cities, Indian treaties, and farming practices. While the discussion was informative, it wasn’t why I was reading the book, so I had a rather hard time getting through the second half. Admittedly though, that is a rather unfair judgment and I expect that if I had gone into the book with a different mindset, I would have enjoyed the second half as much as the first. In some ways I found the author to be as interesting as the book. It didn’t take much research to determine that he is a Scottish historian, which I absolutely did not expect. This was partly unexpected because surveying principles, terminology, and practices are so well portrayed that I fully expected the author to be a surveyor. Secondly, American history is presented as so personal to the author that it never occurred to me he wasn’t American. From several obituaries I read about Mr. Linklater, it appears that he was fascinated with the relationship between people and land; therefore, I suppose it is fairly reasonable that he would write about early surveying and land ownership in our country. I highly recommend this book for anyone interested in learning more about the influences on early surveying practices in our country. Measuring America: How the United States Was Shaped by the Greatest Land Sale in History By Andro Linklater Plume Publishing, 2003 320 pages, paperback Renee Clough is a Pleasant Hill resident who has been working in the civil engineering and land surveying industry since achieving her BS in civil engineering in 2001 from Oregon State University. She is an OSBEELS board member. Surveyors credit Thomas Jefferson with the PLSS system. Please don’t attack me for heresy but I’ve always found this a bit unbelievable. Thomas Jefferson had an enormous amount of political responsibility—how could he have had time to also develop something as complex as the PLSS?
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