The grid
Nearly every rural property description in this state references a grid laid out by surveyors with chains and compasses two centuries ago. It still governs, and its imperfections are still with us.
The Public Land Survey System divides land from an origin point using principal meridians running north and south and base lines running east and west. Missouri is surveyed from the Fifth Principal Meridian.
Two reasons, and both are permanent.
The earth is curved. Meridians converge as they run north. You cannot tile a sphere with squares. The system compensates with correction lines where the grid resets, which is why some township boundaries jog.
The original surveys were done by hand, on foot. Chains, compasses, and often difficult terrain and worse weather. Sections are not exactly 640 acres, lines are not exactly straight, and the errors are baked in permanently.
This last point matters more than it sounds, because the legal rule is that the original survey controls. Where the original surveyor actually set a corner is the corner, even if it is demonstrably in the wrong place. Boundaries follow the footsteps of the original survey, not a corrected ideal grid. Surveyors are not fixing the old work, they are recovering it.
Original corners were marked with wooden posts, stone, charcoal, and blazed bearing trees. Two hundred years later a great many have rotted, burned, been plowed out or been built over.
Re-establishing a lost corner is skilled work. The surveyor uses the original field notes, recovers whatever nearby corners survive, looks for bearing trees or their remains, examines occupation evidence such as old fence lines, and applies established rules of proportion to place the corner where the evidence says it belongs.
Missouri actively funds this. The Land Survey Program contracts with county surveyors to remonument original government survey corners and record accurate coordinates, paying $300 per corner as of July 2017. Every corner recovered removes ambiguity from every boundary that depends on it. See finding Missouri survey records.
If your description is section, township and range, your property lines are measured from these corners. Their condition directly affects what a survey of your land costs and how confidently it can be done. A parcel surrounded by recently monumented corners with recorded coordinates is straightforward. One where the nearest reliable corner is half a mile away and undocumented is not.
