This paper considers the development of a “creole science” of land surveying in colonial British North America and the early United States.[1] Until the mid-eighteenth century, land surveyors in British America had to rely on English methods and manuals to measure American landscapes. Those techniques and guides were poorly suited not only to American conditions but also to the practicioners who had to use them. Colonial surveyors consequently developed simpler methods and traditions that better matched their own needs, skills, and education.
By the end of the eighteenth century, the conditions for surveying had changed considerably. Settlement had expanded, while education and instrumentation had improved. Provincial governments and imperial authorities demanded more accurate measurements. Meanwhile, settlers wanted practical guides for their own use. In time, a few American surveyors and “philomaths” began to write and publish their own manuals. Maryland tobacco inspector Abraham Milton published the first, a small work called The Farmer’s Companion (1761). A few others followed with texts designed to offer “plain and easy” instruction.
After the Revolution, a new patriotic discourse on surveying began to appear in American manuals. These texts were written by and for Americans and designed to be taught in American schools—“unshackled” from English models, methods, and (sometimes) mathematics. One branch of this new American surveying was a simplified “art without science . . . designed for farmers’ boys” that drew from older colonial traditions. The other was a highly sophisticated practice shaped by the scientific advancements of the Enlightenment and the demands of the state. Together, these two branches of “creole science” offered American citizens and surveyors the practical knowledge they needed to measure a new republican empire in North America.
[1] Compare Jorge Cañizares-Esguerra, Nature, Empire, and Nation: Explorations of the History of Science in the Iberian World (2006).
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