Although we had a rough idea of the property lines, we were never quite sure. I remember walking the boundaries of the property with the previous owner, in 1971, when my parents were deciding whether or not to buy it. About 6 years ago, the land behind us was surveyed, so we found out where the south line was, along with the SW corner post. We were pretty sure that the west line followed an old fence, and the side of the township road, and we believed that the creek was the approximate northern border, but we were never really sure.
4 weeks after choosing the cabin site, Elizabeth and I spent another wintry day at the Hollow, following around a couple of surveyors. Unusually for 2011, the day actually started without rain, and it was above freezing. However, the weather report showed a large storm approaching, so we stopped at Tractor Supply to buy some rain gear.
Although early plot maps indicated that the property line was north of the creek, we were a little surprised when the surveyors stuck a new pin into the NW corner, not only to the west of township road, but north of the creek, inside a ditch that drained our neighbor’s soybean field. Almost half of the property line skated across the northern edge of the creek, neatly missing the field to our north, which in 1930 had been owned by the same Fortune family that had owned our property.
The history of Ohio surveying is actually pretty interesting, representing the first attempt of a new country to deal with millions of acres of future farmland. The Public Land Survey System starts on the eastern border of Ohio, which was somewhat experimentally split up into chunks, each of which took on a surveying life of its own. Our property lies in the northern part of the United States Military District ,which was created by an act of Congress in 1796 to compensate Revolutionary War veterans for their service. In practice, virtually no veterans actually took possession of these lands; former soldiers, or their heirs, sold their bounties to speculators, who quickly flipped them at a hefty profit.
Although Congress had specified that public land be surveyed into 6 square mile townships, composed of 640 acre lots, our part of central Ohio is unique in having 5 square mile townships, making the smallest plot sizes 50 & 100 acres, instead of 160. This was probably because the amount of military tract land allocated to an individual was based upon their rank, with a schedule based on 100 acre increments. Noncoms and regular soldiers were entitled to 100 acres. Located just a few miles south of Mad Anthony Wayne’s Greenville Treaty Line, Heiser Hollow is 55/100 of one of these original soldier-sized plots, and the south, west, and northern borders still follow the lines that were originally laid out in an office sometime in the early 19th century. Our lot was split sometime between 1896 and 1930.
I had met up with the surveyors after they had crossed the creek, heading towards the NE corner, holding a mirrored reflector on a stick while they triangulated their way across the northern and eastern property lines. The actual NE corner was about 150′ farther to the east than what I had thought was our corner, a pin underneath a huge beach, which for reasons and source unknown carries the bark carving ‘Joker. That pin marked the corner of the property to the NE of us. A new pin marking the corner of our lot was placed into a ground hog hole, and the surveyors and I started up a steep hill along the eastern line.
Our eastern boundary, which had been mostly a mystery to me before, actually did follow an old fence line for at least 500′. With several generations of rusty barbed wire sticking out the sides of some beautiful border oaks, I’d been aware of this line, which seems to have the remains of a very old logging path on the far side, but I also knew that it didn’t line up with what I thought was the corner. The property line skirts along the back of at least 3 springs, follows the face of a steep slope, and then meets another brand new pin at the SE corner. Knowing where the southern and western lines were, at this point, I left the surveying team in the increasingly wetter and colder weather to confirm on their own that the marked southern line, and the old farm fence along the western line were indeed where expected.
Our forester arrived in the afternoon, and spent over an hour with Elizabeth and I, explaining which trees were ready for timber, which trees had undesirable traits that we wouldn’t want to continue encouraging, and which trees had positive traits and should be left as breeders for future trees. By then, it was getting cold and dark. The last job of the day was to spend 15 cramped moments in the unlit but dry tractor shed, confirming that our Mifi device actually could connect to a local cell site and that my laptop could use it to connect into my company VPN, which would be vital for next summer’s telecommuting. We returned to another early winter evening in the Millersburg Comfort Inn, where we watched the traffic gingerly crawl past on an icy SR 83.
Purchasing a case of yellow tree paint, we’d expected to return within a few months to beat the bounds and blaze trees in compliance with state regulations on forest land. As it turned out, incessant spring rains meant we delayed the start of the cabin until an unusually hot July. Recognizing that this was probably the worst possible time in the year for it, both because of the weather and the underbrush, Elizabeth and I set out with machete and spray paint to find the property markers, and mark out our territory. It was touch and go across the southern border, which has 2 steep gullies that drain into our pond, and is especially brushy since the property behind us was timbered, but we persevered and managed to finish, with almost enough time to return to the motorhome before the thunderstorm hit.
The new cabin is almost exactly in the center of the property, set about 2/3 of the way back from the front. It turns out that the property is not a perfect rectangle, but was subdivided on a slight diagonal, perhaps to follow what was a natural line for running a fence.
[If you want to see all the entries for the cabin building project, they start here. The next Building the Cabin entry, It's Spring Again, returns to November 2011.]
The bathroom ceiling above shows duct work, drainage and cold water running to an upstairs bathroom, along with duct work for downstairs ventilation fans.
Log wall construction creates some challenges for utility routing, with most of the plumbing, wiring, and duct work for the upper floor sharing interior wall space around the bathrooms in the southwest corner. One result of this is a tortuous path for hot air from a plenum in one corner, leading through two closets, a bedroom and a storage nook, ending up with a heating vent inside one of the gabled dormers.
At this point, it seems that everything that is going to be inside a wall is in place, and Sam’s carpentry crew has started installing tongue in groove ceilings and walls in the areas where we decided against drywall. Most of the duct work seems to be in place, and power has been run into the cabin, so we’re hoping that heat pump will be installed soon. So are the subcontractors working inside an unheated cabin in December. We have no work on the when the geothermal company will be drilling or when the heat pump will arrive.
