Monument helps put Willamette Meridian on the map
About 3,400 land markers are buried throughout Washington County
Jennifer Clampet / The Times
A LINE IN THE EARTH – The Principal Willamette Meridian Line monument is a visible reminder to residents that the important land surveying line runs through the east side of the city. The line was established more than 150 years ago.
TUALATIN — GPS systems and satellites aside, the real reason people know where they’re going on their travels is because of a more than 100-year-old system of cedar stakes and chiseled stone land markers.
You might not care too much about latitude and longitude when it’s time to travel to the grocery store. But ask an astronaut, a land surveyor or even a lost tourist with a navigation system in his car and the lines mean the world.
It’s been described as an imaginary line system, one that envelops the world dividing areas into smaller and smaller grids.
But to land surveyors the lines, established by crews working under the 1850 U.S. Land Grant and Survey Act, are very much real. And in each area of the United States are thousands of buried land markers that designate base lines and meridian lines.
In Washington County alone, there are about 3,400 government land markers buried in the earth. Through a 1985 public land corner preservation act, agencies are encouraged to set up funds in order to preserve the markers, some made of cedar. Washington County charges $5 for each real property transaction to fund its preservation efforts.
County surveyor James Elam said the county only has about 560 more markers left to replace. The county replaces the markers with brass caps set in concrete.
That being said, most people pay little attention to the invisible line system. And so for only the second time in his career, Elam participated in a monument dedication for a visual marker of a meridian or base line.
The latitude lines are base lines. The longitude lines are known as meridian lines. In Greenwich, England, the Prime Meridian is one of the better-known lines.
In Tualatin lies the Principal Willamette Meridian line from which all of Oregon and Washington land surveys are measured.
On June 20 a small group of residents gathered in front of a spinning globe mounted to a tall chunk of metal sticking out of the ground near the corner of Southwest 65th Avenue and Nyberg Lane in Tualatin. By no coincidence, the Principal Willamette Meridian line monument aligns perfectly with the telephone poles on Southwest 65th Avenue. The poles are also visual markers that align with the meridian line.
The city erected the monument after the Tualatin Historical Society requested that Southwest 65th Avenue also carry the name of Meridian Road to reflect the street’s alignment with the historical line.
In 1851, U.S. surveyor Gen. John B. Preston drove a stake into the ground to designate the initial point where a base line and a meridian line intersected. This point is now known as the Willamette Stone and is located in the Sylvan community west of Portland.
And from this point, Preston established the Willamette Meridian which runs north to Canada and south to the California border. From that line, parallel lines were designated every 22 miles.
Across the country markers were placed in the ground and the basis for the land survey system upon which boundaries and coordinates are based was begun.
And ever since, county surveyors have perpetuated those markers. To this day, Elam said the Willamette Meridian line is perfect in measurement.
“The line was so important in the past,” said Tualatin Historical Society member Yvonne Addington. “We probably didn’t know how important it would be for the future.”
And while Tualatin’s monument will stand as a visual marker for the line, the rest — about 3,400 markers — are still for the most part unseen.
“It’s not just illegal to touch them (the land markers),” Elam said. “There’s no corner police standing there, but people need to realize that the markers are important for land description.”