County surveyor

County surveyor
Table of Surveying, from the 1728 Cyclopaedia, Volume 2.
George Washington Masonic National Memorial
King Aethelstan and Saint Cuthbert
John Smith 1624 map of Bermuda
The 'marvellous stone bow bridge' at Pontypridd

1. A county surveyor is a public official in many counties of the USA. At the bottom of this page are working "External Links" as at 4 November 2011 to websites of a selection of such County Surveyor's departments. Most of these officials are elected on the partisan ballot to four-year terms. They administer the county land survey records, establish and maintain the survey monuments, and review property boundaries surveys and subdivision plans. Other duties vary from state to state. Those marked with an asterisk (*) are nominated by the National Association of County Surveyors (NACS).[1]

2. NACS is part of the National Association of Counties of the USA (NACo).[2] The NACo website sets out the history of county government in the USA, tracing it back to Anglo-Saxon England, Anglo-Norman feudalism, and the increasingly "plural executive structure" commissioned by the Crown to defend the peace and enforce the chivalric, common, and statutory laws of England up to the time of the first county government formed in America (1634; County of James City, Virginia).[3] It was this framework that the King of England applied to his colonies in North America.[4] The settlers' views of it are set out in the Declaration of Independence.[5]

3. In 1749, "an ambitious George Washington", aged 17, was appointed as the Surveyor-General for Virginia by the College of William and Mary, and became the first registered County Surveyor in America (Culpeper County, Virginia).[6] So, the composition of the duties and the required capacities expected by the King of both a 'state surveyor-general' and a 'county surveyor', and the means of qualifying, chartering and commissioning persons for them, were already tried and tested aspects of county governance by the English Crown. However there is little available documentary evidence of any such established organisation in England attached to the Crown apart from the existence of the Domesday Book as evidence of its capability.

4. A clue to this organisation may lie in the well-known fact that George Washington was not only one of the most famous colonial County Surveyors of America; but one of the most famous Freemasons.[7] In 'Builders of Empire - Freemasonry and British Imperialism, 1717-1927', Jessica L. Harland Jacobs says, "[Freemasonry] had a strong presence in the official institutions of empire ... [and] ... [in] simultaneously helping construct its architecture and constitute its ruling establishment. "[8]

5. England was born of imperialism and colonisation (Roman) and subjected to waves of further imperialism and colonisation (Saxon) and (Norman), before the homogeneity necessary for what the NACo website calls the 'plural executive structure' of English county governance to flourish, and there is substantial evidence of freemasonry in England long before the formation of the Grand Lodge in 1717.

6. The earliest known masonic document[9] (c.1390, and believed to cite (an) even earlier document(s)) refers to freemasonry in Anglo-Saxon England in the reign of Æthelstan (924/5 - 939) and praises Euclid's invention and promulgation of geometry. According to the Masonic Dictionary[10] "Geometry is so fundamentally a part of Freemasonry as to almost require no explanation...it is the science upon which our very fraternity is founded."

7. What is remarkable about this document from the point of view of county administration is that it refers to a 'counterfeited' guild of masons involving the entire hierarchy of Anglo-Saxon central and local government - the king, 'lords', 'dukes', 'earls', 'barons', 'knights', 'squires', 'burgesses' and 'aldermen' - maintained at county level by 'the sheriff of that [country]'[11] and at city level by 'the mayor of that city'.

8. That manuscript, together with some 37 other documents, overall collectively known as the Old Charges[12] reveal as explained in the Foreword of the January 1915 edition of the National Masonic Research Society journal, 'The Builder', "that the Craft-lodges of the olden time were in fact schools, in which young men studied not only the technical laws of building, but the Seven Sciences (namely, Grammar, Rhetoric, Logic, Arithmetic, Geometry, Music and Astronomy)[10] and the history and symbolism of the Order...and such as betrayed no aptitude for the intellectual aims of the Craft were allowed to go back to the Guilds".[13]

9. Such organisation was probably deemed necessary for governance, defence, well-being, and improvement of the realm under the laws of chivalry and commons that applied then (particularly the trimoda necessitas in the history of English land law) and emerged more into the open in the late 16th century / early 17th due initially to the need of the Crown for additional 'royal' qualified surveyors and artisans arising from the Bridges Act 1530, Supremacy Act 1534, Dissolution of the Monasteries 1536-1541 and Laws in Wales Acts 1535–1542 and increasingly as they 're-discovered' from the study of freemasonry the Anglo-Saxon and Anglo-Norman tastes for capacity building, empire building and chivalric trinoda necessitas, creating a momentum via the Tudor conquest of Ireland 1541-1607 that spilled into the start of the development of the British Empire abroad (East Coast of North America.

10. The 'matter-of-factness'/'matter-of-necessariness' of the presence/utility of freemasonry comes out quite remarkably in Harland Jacobs' 'Builders of Empire'; as too does the apparently automatic membership of the Crown's 'Surveyor-General' of each of the provinces and colonies of the most respectable lodges of those provinces and colonies, be it in the Americas, Australasia, India or Africa, particularly as circumstances enabled military governance to withdraw and allow civil governance to take over. The defensive role behind the chivalric trinoda necessitas is illustrated in the John Smith 1624 map of Bermuda showing the fortified and unfortified buildings, artillery emplacements, roads, bridges, waterways and watch tower. It would be wrong to suggest that there was much scientific research and study behind the architecture and engineering of this era: successes arose more by good luck than good judgement, as exemplified by the history of the Old Bridge, Pontypridd in Wales, which took over 100 years for the original commission to be fulfilled, including four unsuccessful attempts by the 'bridge-building mason', william edwards, in his lifetime (his final one, though being considered an example of a 'marvellous stone bow bridge', is incapable of carrying vehicular traffic, so didn't do the job that was asked.[14] Perhaps it was this feature of 'modern' freemasonry that justified the 'ancients' calling it 'speculative' as distinct from 'operative'. The early colonisation of the Americas by England had a similarly 'speculative' feel to it, despite all the pomp and ceremony, which, perhaps, explains why it led to the colonies going to war to win their independence from the Crown.

11. Chapter V 'The Development of an Extra-Legal Constitution', of 'English Local Government from the Revolution to the Municipal Corporations Act: The Parish and The County' by Sidney Webb and Beatrice Potter Web, describes the increasing chaos that began to prevail within this same period on the 'county surveying' front in England and Wales. Eventually, the military defence component of county surveying in the UK began to separate from the civil in 1791, with the Crown's 'Board of Ordnance' being commissioned to carry out a comprehensive survey of the South Coast of England[15] which, as a result of 'the last invasion of Britain 1797', at Fishguard in South West Wales [16] ultimately extended to all of the UK. With that shift in emphasis, county surveying began to concentrate more on its civic architecture and engineering role; "County Surveyor" became a statutory title (Bridges Act 1803) with respect to bridges and other public buildings and works; and sits incumbents began serving elected county councils under the Local Government Act 1888 rather than Crown-appointed officials.

12. With the advent of the Haldane Reforms, World War I, World War II, and the Cold War, there was still a need for considerable confidential liaison between UK county surveyors and the Ministry of Defence, with the result that the 20th century became noteworthy for a series of Official Secrets Acts and virtually every local authority in the country founding its own Freemasonry Lodge;[17] creating so much public and parliamentary concern that the need for official secrets might be abused for private or political ends that the 21st century began with the Local Government Act 2000 requiring elected council officials to declare their personal interests and affiliations, which though not overtly directed at freemasonry, was reminiscent of the Unlawful Societies Act 1799. Eventually, the UK equivalent of NACS, the County Surveyors Society founded in 1885, was subsumed into the Association of Directors of Environment, Economy, Planning and Transport (ADEPT) in 2010.[18]

External links

California

Colorado

Florida

Idaho

Indiana

Michigan

Minnesota

Nebraska

Oregon

Utah

Washington

Wisconsin

References

  1. ^ http://www.uscounties.org/nacs/index.htm
  2. ^ http://www.naco.org/Pages/default.aspx
  3. ^ for related references to early county surveyor arrangements in Virginia see "Kegley's Virginia Frontier" by F.B.Kegley, originally published Roanoke, Virginia, 1938; reprinted Genealogical Publishing Co. Inc. Baltimore, 2003; Library of Congress Catalogue Card No. 2002114477; ISBN 0-8063-1717-5 (limited e-version available on 10 Nov 2011 at http://books.google.co.uk/books/about/Kegley_s_Virginia_frontier.html?id=Bp0nOrLrPlYC&redir_esc=y)
  4. ^ http://www.naco.org/Counties/Pages/HistoryofCountyGovernmentPartI.aspx
  5. ^ http://www.ushistory.org/declaration/document/
  6. ^ http://www.surveysinc.com/history/surveyors.html
  7. ^ http://www.reversespins.com/masons.html
  8. ^ 'Builders of Empire - Freemasonry and British Imperialism, 1717-1927': Harland Jacobs, Jessica: 2007: The University of North Carolina Press: ISBN 978-0-8078-3088-8: pps.4 [and] 163
  9. ^ http://freemasonry.bcy.ca/texts/regius.html
  10. ^ a b http://www.masonicdictionary.com/arts.html
  11. ^ see note attached to definition of "country, n.I.2.a." viz., "formerly often applied to a county, barony, or other part": country, n: Oxford English Dictionary; Second edition, 1989; online version September 2011. <http://www.oed.com/view/Entry/43085>; accessed 10 November 2011. Earlier version first published in New English Dictionary, 1893.
  12. ^ http://www.rgle.org.uk/RGLE_Old_Charges.htm
  13. ^ http://www.masonicdictionary.com/jan1915a.html
  14. ^ p.103; 'English Local Government: The Story of the King's Highway'; Sidney Webb and Beatrice Potter Webb; 1913; Longmans, Green and Co; London: Reprinted 2010 General Books, Memphis, Tennessee, USA; p.75
  15. ^ http://www.ordnancesurvey.co.uk/oswebsite/about-us/our-history/index.html
  16. ^ http://www.fishguardonline.com/last_inv.html
  17. ^ http://www.archive.org/details/StephenKnight-TheBrotherhood-TheSecretWorldOfTheFreemasons PDF Version p.196
  18. ^ http://www.adeptnet.org.uk/

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