Townships and Ranges

The United States Public Lands Survey (USPLS)

by Fred Edwards

Farming families in the 1920s, such as Amy Utter's relatives, might say they lived in a town that actually was merely the community center nearest their home. When I was writing Amy Utter's Journeys - TB and Other Tragedies in Rural America's Heartland, I read in one of her diaries that she overnighted with her "Aunt Gillie" (Nancy Abigail Utter) Feb. 10, 1930, in Cassville, Mo. The next day she caught a bus back to Purdy, where she was staying with her half-sister, Nora Marlow, but she didn't explain where or how she caught the bus.

The explanation came from the U.S. Census, which located Aunt Gillie's home within a township. It was then a simple matter to obtain a map which placed her aunt far from Cassville but near the highway where she would have flagged down the bus to Purdy. The following is how townships and ranges were created.

After the Louisiana Purchase, the federal government decided to sell as much of the lands as possible to the public. In order to make the distribution as equitable as possible among a generally uncharted and very diverse two and a quarter million square miles, officials divided up the west with squares called townships.

A township incorporates a two-part name to describe its distance from the intersection of a prescribed vertical, principal meridian and horizontal base line, such as "Township 23 North, Range 27 West." Except for periodic earth-curvature corrections and previously honored other legal descriptions, a township represents a square of 36 1-mile squares, measured six miles on each side. Each 1-mile square of 640 acres is called a sectionK. In order to describe property transfers of less than 640 acres, a section can be subdivided into halves, quarters (also called "corners"), quarter quarters, and finally lots. The system, along with 1930 U. S. Census annotations, facilitated an estimation of distances between the farms of Amy's grandparents, her parents and her brother as well as the location of the family's "Aunt Gillie" already mentioned. (See David Greenwood, Mapping. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1964. pp. 22-27. )