Section (United States Land Surveying)
In U.S. land surveying under the Public Land Survey System (PLSS), a section is an area nominally one square mile, containing 640 acres (260 ha), with 36 sections making up one survey township on a rectangular grid.
The legal description of a tract of land under the PLSS includes the name of the state, name of the county, township number, range number, section number, and portion of a section. Sections are customarily surveyed into smaller squares by repeated halving and quartering. A quarter section is 160 acres and a "quarter-quarter section" is 40 acres (16 ha). In 1832 the smallest area of land that could be acquired was reduced to the 40 acre quarter-quarter section, and this size parcel became entrenched in American mythology. After the Civil War freed slaves were reckoned to be self-sufficient with "40 acres and a mule." In the 20th century real estate developers preferred working with 40 acre parcels. The phrases "front 40" and "back 40," referring to farm fields, indicate quarter-quarter sections of land.
One of the reasons for creating sections of 640 acres was the ease of dividing into halves and quarters while still maintaining a whole number of acres. A section can be halved seven times in this way, down to a 5 acres (2.0 ha) parcel, or half of a quarter-quarter-quarter section—an easily surveyed 50 square chain area. This system was of great practical value on the American frontier, where surveyors often had a shaky grasp of mathematics and were required to work quickly.
A description of a quarter-quarter section in standard abbreviated form, might look like "NW 1/4, NE 1/4, Sec. 34, T.3S, R.1W, 1st P.M.". In expanded form this would read "the Northwest quarter of the Northeast quarter of Section 34 of Township 3 South, Range 1 West, first Principal Meridian".
Read more about Section (United States Land Surveying): History, Numbering Within A Township, Subdivision of A Section, Measurement Anomalies, Alternatives and Legacy Systems
Famous quotes containing the words section, states and/or land:
“Personally I think we’re over-specialized. Why it’s getting so we have experts who concentrate only on the lower section of a specimen’s left ear.”
—Martin Berkeley, and Jack Arnold. Prof. Clete Ferguson (John Agar)
“The people of the United States have been fortunate in many things. One of the things in which we have been most fortunate has been that so far, due perhaps to certain basic virtues in our traditional ways of doing things, we have managed to keep the crisis of western civilization, which has devastated the rest of the world and in which we are as much involved as anybody, more or less at arm’s length.”
—John Dos Passos (1896–1970)
“O land of manure and mist, of dirty, cold rain.”
—Petrus Augustus De Genestet (1829–1861)