Historical Maps of Jasper County

You know, at first there’s that bum bum bum bum, then a little lower again there’s a bum bum bum bum, and then there’s a kind of a stringy trend upward, and then….. Reading a narrative description of Beethoven’s Fifth just isn’t the same as hearing the real thing.

It’s like reading a narrative legal description instead of viewing an intricate plat or reading a thousand words instead of looking at a picture of a sunset – it’s just not the same. When Kathy asked if I’d like to summarize my recent historic maps talk at Thomas Persons Hall, I thought of the comparisons above and realized it would be tricky. Describing the maps themselves won’t work, I don’t think, so instead I’ll give you a little history behind their creation.

Attendees of the historical maps presentation observed land lot maps, old postal route maps, railroad depot maps, Piedmont Homestead Project maps, soil survey maps, old road maps, Sanborn maps, and others. Here I’m going to describe two of those: land lot maps and Sanborn maps.

From the Middle Ages through the American Revolution (500 through 1776) — in North America and most of Europe at least — all land that anyone claimed to own was given to them, to their ancestors, or to the prior grantors by some king or queen.

Before the United States was formed, the armies of kings and queens claimed or conquered territory and once it was added to their kingdoms, the monarchs doled it out or leased it to their subjects through headright grants.

The land in Georgia lying east of the Oconee River was first settled by non-natives while King George still ruled the land, so the first owners of land in Greene County or Hancock County or Chatham County obtained their property directly from the crown in headright grants. The original grants had haphazard shapes and sizes with no organized patterns.

After the revolution, the United States began acquiring new lands through treaties with native Americans. In the 1795 Treaty of Washington, the Creek tribe sold the United States the land between the Oconee and Ocmulgee Rivers: from Milledgeville to Sac-O-Suds and from the high shoals of the Apalachee to Lumber Town.

There was no longer a king to give the land away to his favorite subjects, so the new government had to figure out a way to distribute it. They couldn’t very well just say, “finders keepers” without creating a terrible mess and a lot of bloodshed. So, the new government decided to give the land away in modern day Middle Georgia in what would be the first land lottery in the world.

It wouldn’t really be a lottery, because everybody that was eligible for a lottery ticket would win a land lot. I guess if you drew a ticket to a swampy lot you might think you’d lost, but everyone got land; and if you know Jasper County, you know most of what was granted around here was very good land.

Before the land could be distributed by the lottery, it had to be surveyed, mapped, and marked on the ground so the lottery ticket holders would know what parcel the in the new part of Georgia had become theirs. So, a grid system of land districts subdivided into land lots, 202.5 acres each, was conceived. The Georgia General Assembly hired surveyors who traversed the long lines through what was very recently Creek Indian territory, marking as much as 10 miles per day. The surveyors mapped creeks and rivers as they went; they marked trees at the land lot corners, and they created district and land lot maps.

The district and land lot references from those very first land deeds are still used today in modern legal descriptions. If you own property, you likely can read the legal description in your deed and find a phrase similar to “lying and being in Land Lot 56, District 16, Jasper County Georgia.” Land lots and districts have been used for 219 years to form a continuous legal thread in the description of your property’s chain of title all the way back to 1806.

If land lot maps were the first boundary surveys of our area, then Sanborn maps were the first as- built maps. In the surveying business, a boundary survey deals with property boundaries, whereas an asbuilt map creates a record of finished infrastructure like streets, water lines, and buildings. By the mid-1800s the industrial revolution had resulted in much construction in the United States.

Along with the new infrastructure came a need for its owners to insure it. Fire was a significant hazard to industrial buildings and homes at that time because most towns and cities didn’t have public water systems; many buildings were wooden; and wood, coal, or gas flames heated and lit most structures. Insurance agents in Atlanta or Charleston or New York could not easily visit all properties to make inspections and assess their fire insurance risks before pricing policies. An engineer named Daniel Sanborn in New York saw the need of the insurers as an opportunity. From 1884 through 1941, Mr. Sanborn’s army of mappers created detailed maps of all buildings in over 12,000 U.S. towns and cities. In Monticello, for example, detailed Sanborn maps were created in 1888, 1893, 1898, 1903, and 1921.

If you are the type of person who enjoys maps and diving into their details, you’ll find the Sanborn maps to be a treasure of interesting items. You can see in the color maps details of how various buildings were constructed. You can see if they had a night watchman, where their water buckets were located, where their wells were located, when public water was provided to their streets, what fuel they used for heating, and when they began to use the newfangled electricity for lighting.

It’s fun to see where various businesses were located. Where were the hotels, the liveries, the blacksmith shops, the banks, the print shops, and the bicycle shops? If you want to learn more about what Monticello’s downtown looked like in a certain year many decades ago, the Sanborn maps are a great resource. If you want a set, contact me at Jordan Engineering and I’d be happy to email them to you.

Mapping information is so plentiful today that sorting through all of the different options is a bigger challenge than finding a certain place. Mapping is so complete, so detailed, and so easy to access that we take it for granted. But we’d miss all the maps pretty quickly if we didn’t have them. Map technology will keep changing, but the need to know where things are located and how to find them won’t go away. And historic maps of a prior time will always hold our interest.

I’ll bet that someone in 2150 will be interested to know where your house used to be or to see what businesses were on the Monticello square way back in 2024. I wonder what medium future people will use to access that information? It won’t be paper, and it probably won’t be digital as we know it. Maybe they’ll be able to stroll through a holograph-like recreation of our 2024 town square, take a look around, and imagine what the streets might have been like back when there were cars – and to think we even had to drive them ourselves!