Measuring America. Andro Linklater

said territory into townships of 6 miles square, by lines running due north and south, and others crossing these at right angles, as near as may be … The lines shall be measured with a chain; shall be plainly marked by chaps on the trees, and exactly described on a plat.’

      The thirty-six-square-mile townships were to be divided into one-square-mile lots, four of which in each township were reserved to the government ‘for the maintenance of public schools’. Every alternate township was to be sold whole, and the intervening ones by square-mile lots. The surveyors were also to make note of prominent features like salt-licks, mines, mills, mountains and the quality of soil, and their compasses were to be adjusted to due north.

      Rufus Putnam was delighted by the proposals, which were almost identical to those he advocated, but in a report to the absent Jefferson, James Monroe commented discreetly, ‘It deviates I believe essentially from your [recommendations].’ Nevertheless, the measuring of America could at last begin.

       SIX A Line in the Wilderness

      THE POINT OF THE BEGINNING had been decided by a boundary commission headed by two of the United States’ finest surveyors, Andrew Ellicott, who would later help to lay out the plan for the nation’s new capital on the Potomac, and David Rittenhouse, whom Jefferson declared to be the greatest astronomer in the world. Their task was to mark out the western boundary of Pennsylvania, running it north until it cut the Ohio river and then on towards Lake Erie. That boundary had been specified in the original charter to William Penn. Until Virginia ceded her claims to the Western Territory, everything beyond that limit had theoretically been hers – all of Kentucky, most of present-day Ohio, Indiana and as far west as Wisconsin. Once the line had been drawn, it would become part of the Northwestern Territory that Thomas Hutchins was to survey.