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Mapping European Settlement in Wisconsin: Dates That Public Lands Moved to Private Ownership

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Mapping European Settlement in Wisconsin: Dates That Public Lands Moved to Private Ownership Mapping European Settlement in Wisconsin: Dates that Public Lands Moved to Private Ownership William J. Craig University of Minnesota Randy Bixby Wisconsin Board of Commissioners of Public Land Mark B. Lindberg University of Minnesota Tom Haight Door County Land Information Office Europeans moved into the American Midwest because they could acquire rights to the land for farming and other purposes. The Land Ordinance of 1785 provided the mechanism to facilitate that transfer, including the Public Land Survey System (PLSS) that defined boundaries of land that could be acquired. Purchase, homestead, and a myriad of other vehicles were developed to allow people to acquire the rights to the land. Online records for most of those first transfers, the land patent, are available from federal Bureau of Land Management (BLM), but a significant portion is only available from the state Board of Commissioners of Public Land (BCPL). This paper describes the process used to collect and map the dates of those initial land transfers on Washington Island, Wisconsin. It starts by describing the PLSS, because that defines the basemap. It documents the various ways that land was transferred from the public domain on Washington Island. It provides documentation on the two basic sources of data on land patents, BLM and BCPL, but also provides insights to other sources when those are inadequate. It closes by documenting the methodology used to transfer this information into map form using Geographic Information Systems (GIS) technology in the Washington Island case study. European settlement brought the concept of early 1840s settlement by fishermen on the private property to Wisconsin. People came to shores of Washington Harbor in the northwest farm and start new lives. Before European corner of the island. No further settlement took settlement, there was no private ownership. In place until 1852, when it spread quickly outward the late 18th Century, the new US government from that initial settlement and was launched in began transferring ownership rights from the harbors on the west side, southwest, and public domain to private ownership. Mapping northeast corner. This spread was associated with the dates of those transfers give clues about lumbering and the beginning of agriculture on original accessibility and value of land within the Island. Land on the east coast was the last to each local community, the settlement of the go; it is infertile with shallow waters, but today is land.1 valued for its scenic water views. Figure 1 is a map of the settlement dates of The checkerboard, rectangular nature of this Washington Island in Door County. It shows map reveals the nature of the land partitioning scheme in Wisconsin and most of the western United States. That checkerboard is known to 1 In this article we equate land settlement date with original private land acquisition from the US public anyone flying over the Midwest today. It is a domain. The two are not necessarily the same, but are reflection of the original Public Land Survey usually closely related. Speculators sometimes purchased System (PLSS) conceived by Thomas Jefferson to land in anticipation of settlement, but they could not help the new US government settle western anticipate too far in advance because they were lands. The PLSS partitioned the land into responsible for local property taxes and other holding costs. More often in northern Wisconsin, individuals townships and sections before settlement, making would buy forest land and harvest the trees for lumber or it easy to define parcels boundaries and thereby fuel. Once cleared, they would quickly sell the land to a easier to transfer land to private ownership: to new settler who would be happy to start farming without patent land. the bother of cutting and hauling those trees. 1 Figure 1. Settlement dates of Washington Island in Door County, Wisconsin Patent is the name given to the first transfer of This article provides an introduction to the public land to private ownership. In today’s PLSS system of partitioning the land and the vernacular, the word is reserved for the various ways the federal government created to government giving exclusive rights to the creator convey that land to private ownership.2 More of inventions. Land Patents have the same importantly, it provides guidance on how to meaning: giving a deed and ownership rights to access information about the dates and names on the initial private land owner. The owner those original patents. The Washington Island acquires rights to use the land, pass it on to heirs, or sell it to others. 2 For an overview of federal programs, see History of Public Land Law Development by Paul W. Gates, online at http://hdl.handle.net/2027/uc1.32106000891595 2 case study is examined in more detail to illustrate Wisconsin-Illinois border and a Meridian that the nature of the patent system. The article runs North/South from near the western end of concludes with a section on the methodology that line, some 10-12 miles east of the used to create an electronic version of the Mississippi. Townships are numbered original PLSS base map for a particular locale and consecutively north from the baseline. Ranges are how to join patent information to that map so it numbered East and West from that Meridian. can be mapped using Geographic Information See Figure 2. Washington Island sits in four Systems (GIS) technology. townships. The township is divided into 36 sections, numbered as shown in the inset of Figure 2. The Public Land Survey System: Each section is one mile on a side: 640 acres. It is Partitioning the Land common for present-day roads to follow those The Paris Treaty of 1783 brought a formal end to section lines. the American Revolutionary War and defined Sections were subsequently quartered, the boundary between British Canada and the creating the standard 160-acre parcel that could new United States Government. The western be purchased or homesteaded by new settlers. edge of those formerly British lands had been the Those quarters are simply labeled northeast (NE), Mississippi. This new Northwest Territory northwest (NW), southwest (SW), and southeast provided the home for future settlers—eventually (SE). Further subdivisions can follow, e.g. adding six new states to the Union, including splitting in half (80 acres) or quartering again (40 Wisconsin. acres). This is shown graphically in Figure 3. A The government needed to get those lands parcel can be legally owned that is simply into private hands for two reasons, one financial described as the E ½ of the SE ¼ of this section. and one strategic. Following the Revolutionary Surveyors took notes3 as they traversed the War, the new Continental Congress was heavily landscape, carving out the familiar township- in debt. It had no power to tax, so selling off range-section system we see today.4 Subsequently their “western lands” to settlers became an township-level maps were created from those important income source. The strategic reason notes. These maps are called plats, because they for moving the public lands to private ownership portray the legally designated partition of the was to encourage settlement of those lands, land by the PLSS. That system and those plats thereby increasing the territorial legitimacy of the form the geographic basis for land ownership new nation—our “Manifest Destiny.” across the western US. The Land Ordinance of 1785 provided the Individual township plats look like the inset mechanism to achieve both goals. It created the on Figure 2, but with more detail about the local PLSS whereby lands were surveyed before settlement. Both Washington and Jefferson had backgrounds in surveying and understood the 3 Images of those original field notes for Wisconsin are need to define boundaries for secure ownership. available at Jefferson was a member of the Continental http://digicoll.library.wisc.edu/SurveyNotes/SurveyNotes Home.html. This site, created by the Wisconsin Board of Congress and on the committee that defined the Commissioners of Public Lands and the University of system familiar to all of us today. Wisconsin Digital Collections Center, also has plat maps created from those notes. 4 Surveyors traversed the landscape throughout Background material on the PLSS as it operated in th the 19 Century, delineating townships and Wisconsin is nicely documented on sections. The PLSS survey of Wisconsin began in http://digicoll.library.wisc.edu/SurveyNotes/SurveyInfo.ht 1832 and continued until after the Civil War. It ml. Additional information about PLSS is available on the State Cartographer’s Office website at was a survey based on the Fourth Principal http://www.sco.wisc.edu/plss/public-land-survey- Meridian Extended, with a baseline on the system.html. 3 Figure 2. Wisconsin survey townships 4 landscape including natural and man-made small.6 For example, Government Lot 1 contains features and water bodies encountered. When a both the NE ¼ of NE ¼ and 24.32 acres of land surveyor encountered a significant body of water, adjacent the water; lot 5 combines two narrow he would create differently shaped parcels labeled bits of lakeshore, both in the NW ¼ quarter, to Government Lots. He would set a post where the make a 22.37 acre parcel. section line intersected the shoreline. Then he would trace the shoreline noting bearings and distances in the Meander section of his survey notes. Cartographers creating the plats from those notes would later take those notes and create and number government lots on the plat, calculating the area of each using trigonometry, and entering that acreage to the plat. Figure 4. Portion of GLO Plat of Township 34 N, Range 29 E showing section 25 on Washington Harbor All land ownership, urban and rural, is tied Figure 3.
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