Stilgoe, Part 2 … Ground Rules

[Yesterday we were introduced to John Stilgoe. Today, SB Steve reveals what makes Stilgoe so interesting. SB SM]

by SB Steve Shepard

If you’ve ever flown over the midwestern United States, you’ve probably noticed the precise gridlines that divide land into large, precise squares. We’ll get to that in a moment, but believe me, there’s a reason for it.

In the U.S., the nominal measurement of land is an acre. An acre measures one chain on one side and one furlong on the other. I know, you don’t know what those are. Neither did I until I researched them, so stand by. An acre is 4,840 square yards, or 1/640 th of a square mile. So, by definition, there are 640 acres in a square mile. And, in case you care, that’s about 40% of a hectare, which is 10,000 square meters, a standard used outside of the US.

So: a furlong is an eighth of a mile, or 220 yards, a little more than the length of two football fields. A chain, meanwhile, is 66 feet, or 22 yards. Not many people use it as a measure anymore to indicate distance, although firefighters do. So, if you multiply 22 yards, a chain, by 220 yards, a furlong, magic—that’s 4,840 square yards, which is an acre.

So, where did acres come from? Well, an acre was originally defined as the amount of land that a person and two oxen could plow in a single day. That was a critically important measure before the combustion engine arrived, because livestock was precious and expensive, and if farm animals were , they could get hurt, making it impossible to plow a field or harvest a crop.

By the way, a furlong is the maximum length of a furrow that could be plowed before the team—human and oxen—needed to stop and rest. One furrow long—a furlong. Language is wonderful.

John Stilgoe points out in Outside Lies Magic that this kind of common knowledge, which has its origins deep in the past, is called ‘ground rules,’ because they were used to do everything from determining the size of farm fields to laying out house foundations to determining where
electrical outlets should be installed and how high off the ground they should be. Did you know that the standard height of an outlet has always been determined by standing an electrician’s hammer upright against the wall? The box for the outlet is installed at the top of the hammer.
True story.

Another important ground rule had to do with the shape of fields, and it isn’t just for aesthetic reasons. It turns out that square fields require less fencing than rectangular fields. A square field that is 1,000 feet on each side has a million square feet inside and requires 4,000 feet of fencing to enclose it. But a rectangular field that’s 500 feet on one side and 2,000 feet on the other encloses the same number of square feet of land, but requires 5,000 feet of fence, not 4,000. In spite of this, farmers prefer rectangular fields, even though they have to pay for another thousand feet of fencing. Why? Because rectangular fields require fewer turnarounds, and turning around costs time, energy, and fuel which, on a large field, costs more than the added fence—not to mention wear-and-tear on your team of oxen.

John Stilgoe traces the origins of these measurements to the early days of the country. In fact,they were one of the many things that John Adams and Thomas Jefferson, the second and third US presidents, fought about. For example, when it came to adopting a standard of measurement for the new country, they wanted to go in different directions. Jefferson wanted to use a decimal system, where everything would be counted in multiples of ten, while Adams wanted to use the system that had been in use in Europe for centuries. His reasoning was interesting. Adams didn’t want to use the decimal system, because in his mind it gave an economic advantage to the wealthy. The system he wanted to use—one based on a 12-count numbering scheme, not ten—made it easier for less wealthy citizens to prosper, because it made it much easier to divide and share wealth, as required, than the decimal system did. If you think about it, it makes sense. Imagine a farmer who wants to sell eggs. If a system is used based on the number ten, then eggs can only be sold in groups of one, five, or ten. But if a twelve-based system is used, eggs can be sold in groups of one, two, three, four, six, andtwelve.

But Adams’ concerns went beyond the selling of farm products. He was also concerned with the very real need to populate the newly formed country and get land into the hands of farmers and ranchers quickly and efficiently as possible. Again, his reasoning was sound. Every square mile contained 640 acres, which could easily be divided between two or four farm or ranch families. In fact, since the belief at the time was that 40 acres was the minimal size of a piece of land required to support a family and a piece of farm equipment—that would be an ox—then a square mile could be divided into 16, 40-acre parcels.

Ultimately, Adams won the argument, and convinced Jefferson that townships in the central and western part of the country, those big square areas I referred to at the beginning of this episode, should be laid out by surveyors as six-square-mile parcels. Each township, then,
contained 36 sections of land, with each section being one square mile—640 acres.

As it turns out, both Adams and Jefferson got what they wanted. Jefferson won because the nation’s currency became decimal-based; Adams won because land management was based on the old ‘ground rules.’ And, don’t forget—days still have two dozen hours and years have a dozen months. Point, Adams.

The next time you’re flying over the middle of the country, marveling at all the open space down there (and there’s a lot of it), pay attention to the roads that delineate the farm fields (by the way, this doesn’t work with the freeways, just the surface roads). They’re all perfectly straight, they cross at perfect right angles, and they are exactly one mile apart. Thanks, President Adams.