A little corner of Koochiching County’s history was brought to the county board table Tuesday.
Surveyor Matt Gouin showed commissioners a corner marker set by surveyor John Mulligan in August 1898.
The cedar post marker, which features scribed numbers describing the section and range, was found this summer as state workers resurfaced Highway 1.
“The backhoe operator, everybody there was excited,” said Gouin, who told the county board he jumped into the hole when he saw the wood. “I go crazy. It’s exciting to locate original evidence — it’s 100-year-old evidence and it can rot away. Any surveyor not excited about that is not loving surveying as much as I do.”
Gouin, who works for county contractor Murray Surveying, said Mulligan’s job placing the corner must been miserable — it was August and there were no roads in the area, but probably plenty of bugs.
But a survey’s job plays an important role in the past and the future of residents and governments.
“Our job is to monument, to locate boundaries of a described parcel, but also in the process of doing that we are mediators,” he aid. “We mediate solutions to people’s problems with their boundaries. All we do is present the facts: what we see and what we find in the field.”
Gouin said he’s a great believer in working with neighbors when property boundaries are a concern. He said moving a structure or going to court over boundary disputes can be more expensive than having a survey performed.
And, he said preserving the survey monuments in the county is valuable to everyone.
“Monuments are really important,” he said. “They are the basis of our properties — everybody’s properties are based on those corners. That’s why it’s so important to protect them. If they are destroyed, it costs a lot of money to relocate them so we need to protect them.”
Monuments are often found during construction projects, said Gouin. Evidence of monuments may be sought in a particular location based on historical data available, he said.
“We pick and choose where we might have some success,” he said. Where the ground has been cut into, a corner marker may have already been removed. But in the Highway 1 situation, he said four feet of dirt had been filled.
Gouin described his job as being a little historian, a little librarian, a technology person and a public mediator that often deals with controversial issues. He noted that he once opened a survey book published around 1916 or so and found a mosquito had been preserved between its pages. He joked as he wondered if it contained the DNA of the surveyor who recorded information in the book.
Property boundaries are close to the heart for many owners, he said. By around 1 p.m. Tuesday, he’d already dealt with two issues involving encroachments. One person would likely have to remove fence posts already set in the ground and they probably wouldn’t be happy, said Gouin.
“A survey is so important,” he said. “People take a risk if they don’t get a survey of their property. Get a survey if you want to be sure about the title of the property. If you don’t, understand there is risk. And in the end, (a survey is) a small price to pay versus the costs associated with fixing a problem if there is one.”
Meanwhile Tuesday, Gouin also showed commissioners a scribe similar to the one used in 1898 to mark the cedar corner marker. He said he uses the scribe, made in the 1920s or ‘40s, today to scribe bearing trees with information about the section and township that grow near corner markers. And, he said the vintage scribes work better than ones produced today with replaceable blades that can break.
Iron pipes are now placed in the ground as corner markers, he noted.
