Metes and Bounds, Township and Range, and Long Lots

Look down from a plane over Iowa or Nebraska and the fields form a checkerboard. Look down over Massachusetts or Connecticut and the fields look like a jigsaw puzzle. That difference comes from how the land was surveyed before anyone farmed it. New England and the original colonies used metes and bounds, an old English method that describes a parcel by walking its edges: start at a landmark, go a measured distance in one direction, turn at another landmark, and so on until you return to the start. Because landmarks are uneven and distances were paced by hand, the resulting parcels are irregular.

After independence, the federal government needed a faster, fairer way to divide the vast lands west of the original colonies, so it adopted township and range. Surveyors picked a baseline running east-west and a principal meridian running north-south, then built a grid of squares outward from that intersection. Each township is six miles by six miles, divided into 36 sections of one square mile each. Anyone can find a parcel just from its coordinates, like Section 14, Township 3 North, Range 2 West, with no landmarks needed. This is why the Midwest looks like a grid from above: the land was divided on paper before it was settled.

Long lots belong to French colonial regions like Quebec and parts of Louisiana. Farms were laid out as narrow strips running back from a river, so every family got frontage on the water no matter how the land was divided. A square parcel covering the same total area would leave many farms landlocked. All three systems connect to Von Thunen's logic: whoever draws the lines, access to water, roads, or markets still shapes how land gets used.