FoolInTheDesert t1_j7fred3 wrote on February 6, 2023 at 2:03 PM

Reply to comment by PorkRindSalad in Lead Plates and Land Claims in North America and Europe: When did the practice begin of burying lead plates to establish ownership of land, and why did it die out, and was it ever used successfully in a court of law to establish ownership? by whyenn

It's common in older cities. For example in Arizona, in cities like Bisbee and Tombstone, you can find multiple section corners and property corners set in close proximity to each other by different surveyors. In one case I know of 6 different pins meant to be the same point all spread out over an 8sqft area. How do you resolve this? Well a surveyor has to dig through records and try to figure out which point to hold, OR in many cases you might have to go testify in court for it to get settled because property owners will sue each other. In many cases we had to spend a day collecting control data and then had to calculate the correct pin location and set our own more accurate pin with our survey data on it. It can get complicated!

Surveyor errors are actually common and have led to many a state/national border or property line dispute and ongoing design, infrastructure layout issues, etc. to this day all over the country!

duncan345 t1_j7jjg0k wrote on February 7, 2023 at 6:23 AM

In my experience you deal with this by doing a thorough title search and getting an ALTA survey, which would show the existence of several conflicting landmarks. Hopefully you can then get a boundary line agreement with the adjoining land owners. Usually the neighbors are fine with accepting whatever they perceived the boundary line to be. Then you record the boundary agreement in your county land records so that future title searchers know the problem has been cleared up.