The Beginning Point of the U.S. Public Land Survey is a monument at the border between the U.S. states of Ohio and Pennsylvania, on the north side of the Ohio River. It is near the three-way intersection of Ohio, Pennsylvania, and the northern tip of West Virginia, in both the Pittsburgh metropolitan area and the East Liverpool micropolitan area. It is significant as being the point from which the Public Land Survey System was performed, starting in 1785, which would open what was then the Northwest Territory for settlement. The survey was "the first mathematically designed system and nationally conducted cadastral survey in any modern country" and is "an object of study by public officials of foreign countries as a basis for land reform." It was conducted in the late 18th century by Geographer of the U.S. Thomas Hutchins surveying the Seven Ranges.
Built in 1881, it was declared a National Historic Landmark in 1965.
The area that is landmarked includes a part of Ohio and a part of Pennsylvania. A plaque at the site states that the true starting point was 1,112 feet further south. The commemorative site is located about 2 miles east of the center of East Liverpool on Ohio State Route 39 and Pennsylvania Route 68.
Famous quotes containing the words beginning, point, public, land and/or survey:
“I know this well, that if one thousand, if one hundred, if ten men whom I could name,—if ten honest men only,—ay, if one HONEST man, in this State of Massachusetts, ceasing to hold slaves, were actually to withdraw from this copartnership, and be locked up in the county jail therefor, it would be the abolition of slavery in America. For it matters not how small the beginning may seem to be: what is once well done is done forever.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“When women reach the age of maturity, Mother Nature sometimes overworks their frustration to the point of irrationalism. Like the middle-aged man...who finds himself looking longingly at a girl in her early twenties.”
—Mark Hanna, and Nathan Hertz. Dr. Von Loeb (Otto Waldis)
“For public opinion does not admit that lofty rapturous laughter is worthy to stand beside lofty lyrical emotion and that there is all the difference in the world between it and the antics of a clown at a fair.”
—Nikolai Vasilyevich Gogol (1809–1852)
“How much better when the whole land is a garden, and the people have grown up in the bowers of a paradise.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)
“By contrast with history, evolution is an unconscious process. Another, and perhaps a better way of putting it would be to say that evolution is a natural process, history a human one.... Insofar as we treat man as a part of nature—for instance in a biological survey of evolution—we are precisely not treating him as a historical being. As a historically developing being, he is set over against nature, both as a knower and as a doer.”
—Owen Barfield (b. 1898)