By Charlie Warner
Argus News Editor
Houston County Surveyor Richard Walter is a modern day Indiana Jones…well kind of. He doesn’t travel all over the globe looking for the lost arc or other priceless treasures, but like “Indy,” he studies maps, digs for clues, and searches for valuable artifacts.
As county surveyor, Walter’s job is to establish where property lines throughout the county run. Sounds easy, but it’s actually a monumental endeavor when you consider Houston County was surveyed more than 150 years ago, and the trees, stones, and wooden posts that were used as corner markers have all disappeared decades ago.
Walter and his staff of one full-time person and a summer intern have been busy recently trying to locate the cornerstones of the platted village of Sheldon. Located on Beaver Creek, four miles northwest of Caledonia, Sheldon was platted as a village by its founders Julius Sheldon and John Brown in November of 1855.
Although the village, tucked in a scenic river valley, never flourished, there is renewed interest in the property within the platted limits of Sheldon.
According to County Planning and Zoning Administrator Bob Scanlan, his office considers any old platted villages as residential areas. And unlike rural ag land, which zoning laws only allow one house per 40 acres, a person can build a home on one acre of land in an area like Sheldon.
“We had two zoning permits for new homes just this past month in Sheldon,” Scanlan noted. “This is a good area to develop.”
Because of this renewed interest in the little village, Walter’s office is responsible in providing the correct information so persons purchasing property know where their property lines are.
“One of the problems we are having is when Sheldon was platted, it included streets, alleys, a town square, and lots that are 60 feet wide and 120 feet deep. But very little of the town was developed. Folks purchased land, and built houses, barns, sheds, sometimes on platted roads, sometimes on platted alleys,” Walter explained.
But if the village was officially platted, do the streets and alleys have to be vacated before homes, garages, and other out buildings are constructed on them? And because the county zoning laws dictate a person needs at least one acre of land to construct a new home in rural residential, almost any building site will probably require street or alley vacations.
Walter said his office is fairly sure some of the streets and alleys were vacated by the Sheldon Town Board, but he needs to find out if everything was done properly, which is just one more reason the cornerstones of the village must be found.
The entire Village of Sheldon is approximately 40 acres. In 1966 parts of the village were resurveyed when CSAH 10 was built. Walter believes his staff has found two of the corner markers.
In 2000, a retracement survey was done. Walter wonders how accurate that survey was since no one is certain if the original corner markers that were set more than 150 years ago were used.
To complicate matters even more, Houston County did not have an official county surveyor from 1937 until Walter was hired in 1985. During that period, nearly all the field records, which gave accurate descriptions to where many of the corner markers throughout the county were located, were lost.
“In 1942, the CCC Program had inventoried all of the documents in the courthouse, including all of the surveyor’s field records,” Walter said. “There were supposed to be 57 volumes of field records. In 1985, when I first started working here, I looked for those volumes. They were all gone. No one knew where they went.”
Walter has spent the past 23 years searching for and locating corner markers, and filing new field records. A map of Houston County in Walter’s office is covered with various colored push pins. The map is almost completely filled. The vast majority of the corner markers indicating section lines have been found…but not all of them. And that’s what keeps Walter and his staff going.
You can contact Charlie Warner at
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