The western border of Pennsylvania is as straight and upright as a Marine drill sergeant, but creeping from the south — like a fungus slogging up the sharp crease of his dress blues — is a thin strip of West Virginia wedged between Ohio and the southwest edge of The Keystone State. For 64 miles this panhandle climbs north, barely 23 miles wide at its base and less than five miles across near the top where the Ohio River marks the intersection of three state lines. This is the spot I aimed for on the first day of a three-day road trip through the Midwest on my way to Minnesota.
Aside from the fact that three means of westering run parallel to each other and pass by here — river, rail, and Route 39 — only one thing makes this spot on the north side of the asphalt two-laner between Ohioville, PA, and East Liverpool, OH, remotely remarkable: a largely unknown National Historic Landmark identifying this as “The Point of Beginning.” The obvious question is this: what could have begun in this sleepy backwater that merits a national landmark? Banjo music? Bib overalls? The idea for the television variety show Hee Haw?
Of course not. While this site didn’t merit a National Park Service commemorative quarter and doesn’t draw a parade of RVs filled with gray-haired retirees and buses full of foreign tourists taking selfies, I was still determined to get here. Yes, it’s obscure, but events at this location literally shaped the rest of the country and standardized the language of land I grew up with in Minnesota.
I spent much of my youth in Lamberton Township on a 160-acre farm my parents rented from an elderly couple who lived near Lucan, Minnesota. Even as a kid, I understood that we paid so much rent per acre, that our 160 acres constituted a quarter section, and that four quarter sections — or 640 acres — made a section, which was one square mile of land. The logic and geometry of this part of the country was impossible to miss because most roads intersect at right angles in one-mile intervals. Plus, a fence line cutting through the middle of a section and separating one farmer’s field from another’s usually designated the boundary between two quarter-sections and the half-mile mark from the last intersection. All of this seemed perfectly logical and even intuitive to me as a kid riding bike on the gravel township roads or as a teenager cultivating corn with the B John Deere in the north forty or as a 20-something training for a marathon and choosing the route for a 16-mile run on a Saturday morning.
What was less clear to me, however, was how Dad visualized an acre or estimated the size of a plot of soybeans that was hailed out or drowned out and had to be replanted. He often talked in terms of rods, an ambiguous length of measure that only exacerbated my problem of seeing an acre. But what I recently discovered is that this was the same standard Thomas Hutchins used in 1785 at “The Point of Beginning” — along with chain, furlong, and mile — to establish the Geographer’s Line, from which all land west, except Texas, was surveyed, measured, and quantified.
I clearly did not understand what Dad did: that a rod equals 5.5 yards, 4 rods (or 66 feet) equals one chain, and 40 rods is the equivalent of 1/8 mile, which, as horseracing fans likely know, is one furlong. In terms of land, the customary shape of an acre is one chain by one furlong, or 4 rods by 40 rods, or 66 feet by 660 feet. Of course, these terms haven’t always been standardized by such specific measures. Originally, one furlong, which is short for “furrow length,” referred to the much less precise distance of how far a team of oxen could pull a plow before resting, and an acre (from the German Acker, meaning “field”) was how much land they could plow in one day.
These relatively small units of measure were then applied by Thomas Hutchins, starting at that obscure location between Pennsylvania and Ohio, to survey the Seven Ranges, the beginning of the Public Land Survey System in the U.S. This system was then used throughout the 1800s to organize the seemingly boundless acreage west of this point not only into sections and fractions of sections to be sold, settled, and farmed but also into larger blocks of land called townships. Each thirty-six-square-mile township was laid out in six rows of six sections each, which were then numbered boustrophedonically, or “as the cow plows.” This simply means that the northernmost row was numbered 1 through 6 from east to west, the second row 7 through 12 from west to east, the third row 13 through 18 from east to west, and so forth up to 36. Even though in the 21st century these references to cows, oxen, and plowing might feel antiquated and anachronistic, this system of surveying and numbering was and still is a precise method of documenting locations, divisions, and ownership of land.
What was begun by Hutchins at “The Point of Beginning” helps clarify several things: why the metric system is unlikely to be accepted in the U.S., especially in rural areas; why, when seen from above, everything from Ohio to the Rockies and from Oklahoma to central Minnesota looks like a patchwork quilt comprised of uniform blocks of varying shades of green and brown; and why last month just west of East Liverpool, Ohio, I found a square meal at a café and a square deal on regular gasoline that carried me westward into the grid work that now constitutes the lay of the land.
