In the early years of Indiana’s settlement, the federal government sent land surveyors to mark out the state’s counties. Surveyors laid out cornerstones in one-mile squares, called sections, and the section corners were established by the United States General Land Office between 1819 and 1821.
To this day, those corners form the base grid from which all properties in Indiana are legally measured.
Jim Swift knows those corners well—before founding Swift Land Consulting, he was in charge of section corner perpetuation for the Boone County Surveyor’s office. He hunted for and documented the stones’ locations, then set permanent monuments to make certain those precise coordinates would never be lost.
Section corner perpetuation continues to be one of our specialties. We currently continue that work under contract for the Boone County Surveyor’s Office and others.