LeeAnn,
Someone told me the Pike County Chamber of Commerce (P.O. Box 291,
Petersburg, IN 47567) will mail you a really nice Plat Map of Pike County
if you ask them. I bought mine at the courthouse for $5 in the Auditor's
Office.
If you have the 1881 Plat Map book which has both Gibson and Pike in it you
will find that many of the roads are the same, unless they were in an area
where it was strip mined.
Monroe and Lockhart townships have changed the most, but there are changes
in almost every township due to the mining.
I have an 1974 plat map here at the house. Tell me the area (township,
range, and county township you are looking at and I will compare them for you.
This article was written by June Phillips and submitted to the Pike County
History Page of the Press-Dispatch on July 9, 1998. It might help.
History of land surveying in county
By June Phillips
Have you ever looked at a plat map and wondered why some farm land follows
the section survey lines but other land doesn't? Do you know how long your
farm has teen titled to someone? A plat book can tell you if there were
previous owners prior to 1804.
During Colonial times, the pioneer would select a piece of land where ever
he liked without giving thought to uniformity of size or shape. After
having made a crude survey of the land and marking the limits of the
property by some method, the survey would be placed on record with a land
office in the area.
Because of the strange and varying sizes of pieces of property and the odd
shaped of tracts of land, there were often overlapping claims on properties
which caused numerous problems.
In order to avoid such confusion in the settlement of the New Territory and
States, Thomas Jefferson came up with a plan for laying out land tracts.
Jefferson's plan was passed by the U.S. Congress in 1785 and it is the
foundation for our system of surveying land today.
Jefferson suggested it should be assumed the equator is the "basis for
survey and as there is a degree of parallel every 69.25 miles north of the
equator, the first parallel passing through the southern part of the state
and the first meridian passing through the western part of the state should
constitute the median for the state.
The :Base Line for Indiana runs through Pike County traversing Clay,
:Madison, :Washington and :Jefferson Townships in a horizontal line.
All land north of the base line is designated "Townships North" while all
land south of the base line is designated "Townships South.
The first meridian is the line between Ohio and Indiana. The second runs
north and south through Indiana. The third and fourth meridians run through
Illinois while the 24th meridians is just west of Portland, Oregon.
The first land survey ordered to begin in Indiana was in 1804. Since the
Base Line traversed Pike County, Pike County was one of the earliest
counties surveyed.
All lands titled after 1804 will conform to Section lines. If your boundary
lines are not square with the section lines, then someone had title to the
land prior to 1804.
Examples of these can best be seen in Knox County although Pike and Gibson
Counties both have sections that show very readily where the people settled
first.
In Petersburg, an example of that would be a small tract of land along the
White River in ::Madison Township and a large area of land in ::Clay Township.
This land is made up of 50 acre tracts which were given to patriots as
reward for Revolutionary War service.
Only the land in Clay Township, Madison Township and ::Petersburg itself,
sits on the bias like most of the old ::French Survey which was done in
Knox County.
All other farmlands in Pike County follow the section survey conducted in 1804.
To find out more about the history of your land you can check the Volume of
American State Papers, record of lands granted to families in the Vincennes
area before 1783 and old land titles.
Some of the earliest surveyors in Pike County, according to The History of
Pike and Dubois Counties were Hosea :Smith (1817), William :Hawthorn
(1847), William C. :Davenport (1852), John H. :Boyd (1858), Mark :Reed
(1864), H. D. :Onyett (1865), D. W. :Horton (1866), William C. :Miller
(1870), John B. :Blaize (1874), Josiah :Martin (1878), and F. R.
:Bilderback (1884).