chain of 10 tricounty points on ncsc state line up for valentines day review

[Aletheia Kallos]

When the boundary between South Carolina and its sister state to the north
was laid out in 1772, it was marked by trees every mile or so — trees that
have long since fallen and returned to the soil from whence they came.

That’s why the two states have agreed to settle once and for all where the
line is, by setting up a North Carolina-South Carolina Joint Boundary
Commission, which has been working to sort it out.

Much of the state boundary east of Greenville County looks like a straight
line on the map. But in reality, it had zigs and zags that defined property
lines, according to Alan Zupan, of the South Carolina Geodetic Survey.

In some areas, it’s hard to say where one state ends and another begins, he
said.

The work of defining the line has come to a critical point for residents
and businesses along a section of the boundary that runs from the border
between Greenville and Spartanburg counties east to a spot called “the Old
North Corner” in Lancaster County.

A public meeting has been called for 1 p.m. Tuesday at York County
Technical College’s Baxter Hood Conference Center to give property owners a
chance to express their concerns. Representatives from the attorney general
offices of both states will be there, along with members of the boundary
commission.

“We are aware that it’s going to be affecting some of the residents along
the line, and we tried to identify those and try to find out what kind of
issues there may be,” Zupan said.

The boundary between Greenville, Pickens and Oconee counties and North
Carolina was re-surveyed and agreed upon in 2005.

“I hope everybody feels some love” at the meeting, which falls on
Valentine’s Day, Zupan said.

Representatives of the counties along the border in question this time —
Spartanburg, Cherokee<http://www.greenvilleonline.com/article/20120210/NEWS/302100015/North-South-Carolina-work-on-boundary-issues?odyssey=tab%7Cmostpopular%7Ctext%7CNEWS#>,
York and Lancaster in South Carolina and Polk, Rutherford, Cleveland,
Gaston, Mecklenburg and Union in North Carolina — also have been invited to
the meeting.

Near the Greenville-Spartanburg county line is an area that both states in
the past have claimed and both issued land grants.

“It was sort of a no-man’s-land,” Zupan said.

Sorting out the real boundary became a detective job of sorts.

“So what we did was we developed a methodology where we decided to look at
the land grants, the deeds and the plats that were created at this time, in
1772, and try to find on those documents references to the line trees which
marked the boundary,” he said.

“And then, using land record research, we tried to follow the chain of
ownership to the present if we could in order to see if we could identify a
point in the present that was the same as that line tree back in 1772,” he
said.

“Then if we were able to do that we would be able to establish a boundary
for the present.”

Most of the border with Spartanburg County is rural, although the areas get
more urban as the state’s border approaches York County, Zupan said.

In the Greenville County survey a few years ago, it turned out that the
line ran through some people’s houses.

“Over time, South Carolina lost their copy” of the original map, Sid
Miller, South Carolina boundary coordinator for the South Carolina-North
Carolina Boundary Commission, said at the time.

“They went to North Carolina and had a certified copy made.”

Then North Carolina lost its copy.

Meanwhile, South Carolina’s went missing again.

The South Carolina copy turned up about in about 1995, so everyone has a
copy again.

The roll of paper is about 15 feet long.


article

http://www.greenvilleonline.com/article/20120210/NEWS/302100015/North-South-Carolina-work-on-boundary-issues?odyssey=tab%7Cmostpopular%7Ctext%7CNEWS



county locator maps

http://www.digital-topo-maps.com/county-map/north-carolina.shtml

http://geology.com/county-map/south-carolina.shtml


westernmost

http://mapserver.mytopo.com/homepage/index.cfm?lat=35.187755&lon=-82.21656300000001&scale=24000&zoom=50&type=1&icon=0&searchscope=dom&CFID=900660&CFTOKEN=45105238&scriptfile=http://mapserver.mytopo.com/homepage/index.cfm&latlontype=DMS


easternmost

http://mapserver.mytopo.com/homepage/index.cfm?lat=35.000930999999994&lon=-80.839299&scale=24000&zoom=100&type=1&icon=0&searchscope=dom&CFID=900660&CFTOKEN=45105238&scriptfile=http://mapserver.mytopo.com/homepage/index.cfm&latlontype=DMS

[aletheiak-/[e-mail] [boundarypointpoint]]

the enclosed update in todays nytimes is thanx to the good offices of david phillips tho the break in the text & the confusing separation of the callouts from the visuals are not his fault

DURHAM, N.C. — BORDER disputes between American states are as old as the republic, but in today’s highly charged political atmosphere they often take an ugly turn.
Georgia and Tennessee, to cite the loudest current example, are trading insults and ultimatums over a strip of land barely a mile wide. In 1990 Georgia marched South Carolina to the Supreme Court over a handful of islands in the Savannah River (South Carolina prevailed). New Jersey did the same to New York a few years later over landfill around Ellis Island. When New Jersey won, Rudolph W. Giuliani, then the mayor of New York City, quipped, “It must have been a fix.”
So it may come as a surprise that North and South Carolina, two states better known for philandering politicians and restrictive voter ID laws than progressive politics, are quietly collaborating on an enormous undertaking to re-mark their misplaced 334-mile common boundary.
Their two-decade effort is not complete, and the fate of a gas station whose pumps have surfaced in the “wrong” state could derail the whole thing. But if they succeed, they might well set an example of comity and cooperation for the rest of our head-butting nation.


main story continues below after the following illustrated sidebar


Correcting a Long Line of Errors
The North Carolina-South Carolina border veered miles away from the course British colonial officials intended, and then effectively disappeared as the trees it was marked on died. The states’ current effort to find and remark that boundary could have big effects on the ground.

NORTH CAROLINA
Henderson
Mecklenburg
Rutherford
Originally intended
colonial boundary
Cleveland
Jackson
Transylvania
Polk
Gaston
95
1772 survey
1
CHARLOTTE
1815 survey
3
2
Cherokee
Detail below
Union
Anson
Richmond
35° N
York
Greenville
1813 re-survey
Pickens
Spartanburg
Scotland
1764 survey
Oconee
Robeson
1905 re-survey
Lancaster
Chesterfield
Marlboro
4
1735-37 survey
The present-day border was surveyed in several stages over 80 years. As messy as it was, the two states agreed to it in 1815.​
Dillon
Columbus
Marion
GEORGIA
Brunswick
1928 re-survey
Horry
SOUTH CAROLINA
25 miles
2
1
Parcel boundaries, used for taxation, overlap and sometimes spill over presumed state lines. The Lake Wylie Mini Mart would find itself in North Carolina if the border shifts; now the property is split in two.
Dr. Frederick G. Berlinger built a house in what he thought was Polk County, N.C. The clarified line puts most of the house in South Carolina. Some of it, apparently, was always there.
NORTH CAROLINA
100 feet
150 feet
N.C. parcel
boundary
NORTH CAROLINA
Mini Mart
S. C. version of border
S.C. parcel
boundary
N.C. version of border
SOUTH CAROLINA
SOUTH CAROLINA
3
4
Some houses along the border, like these in Gaston and York Counties, would switch states or straddle the new line. In this area, there already is a roughly 50-foot discrepancy between the counties’ surveys.
South of the Border, a tourist landmark, will remain true to its name: that portion of the state line was deemed accurate. (A section adjoining the complex’s Silver Arcade was, and will remain, north of the border.)
NORTH CAROLINA
500 feet
300 feet
NORTH CAROLINA
Silver
Arcade
N.C. version of border
SOUTH CAROLINA
95
S.C. version of border
South of the Border complex
SOUTH CAROLINA
By Joe Burgess and Bill Marsh
Source: North Carolina-South Carolina Joint Boundary Commission






main story continues here


To appreciate the heroic dimensions of the states’ border challenge, you have to go back 280 years and look at the mess they inherited.
When the two Carolinas were created as separate British colonies, they were supposed to be split by two simple straight lines: one running northwest from the Atlantic Coast to the 35th Parallel, the other following the 35th due west to the “South Seas.” But making the territory resemble the map wasn’t so easy.
The original 1735 survey party, for example, had members who sometimes didn’t show up, sometimes didn’t get paid and often gave up while trudging through the ghastly swamps and wilderness they encountered on their way up from the coast. That may explain why they failed to reach their target, the 35th Parallel, after two years of effort: Instead, they drove a stake into the ground 12 miles too far to the south, and went home.
Another party, sent out in 1764 to continue the survey, headed west from that same erroneous stake, despite explicit orders from King George III to verify that the first surveyors had indeed reached the 35th Parallel. By the time they detected their error, 64 miles later, they had shaved 422,000 acres off what was supposed to be South Carolina. Subsequent efforts to compensate South Carolina by continuing the westward line slightly north of the 35th Parallel were similarly jinxed, this time by a compass-deflecting magnetic anomaly west of present-day Charlotte, N.C., that skewed the boundary slightly northwest, carving thousands of acres out of what was supposed to be North Carolina.
This was the boundary that confronted the Carolinas in the early 1990s, when Duke Energy offered to sell the two states land that straddled both of them. The utility asked the not unreasonable question of exactly where the boundary ran. The trouble was, the notched trees the original surveyors had used to mark the boundary were long gone. Neither state knew exactly where it was.
The default response these days to situations like this is usually conflict, which can be costly. The legal bill for South Carolina’s defense against Georgia, for example, topped $10 million, and so traumatized South Carolina officials that they looked for a peaceful way to find the missing border with North Carolina.
In 1993 the two states’ mapping agencies pledged to cooperate, harnessing geospatial technology to old-fashioned detective work. In one border segment near Charlotte, they unearthed colonial-era property maps that had used the boundary trees as tract corners and overlaid Geographic Information System data — mapping technology accurate within inches — to calculate where the trees once stood.
In another segment, researchers found a stone boundary monument that had been set as part of a 1928 resurvey, except it now stood near a tee on a golf course. Officials at the course had moved it years before so duffers could brag about their two-state tee shot. Using the original 1928 maps, advanced mathematics and some informed guesswork, the joint survey teams navigated to the exact spot where the monument had been uprooted, and even found its broken-off base.
By 2013, the entire 334-mile boundary had been relocated and re-marked. Unfortunately, it was not always where people had thought it was. Some residents living near the boundary discovered that their homes were in fact in a different state. A North Carolina doctor discovered that the room in his home where he sometimes saw patients was in fact in South Carolina, and worried he would have to get a South Carolina medical license.
Fortunately, the two states had seen this coming, and the Joint Boundary Commission they formed to oversee the surveying began to catalog potential negative impacts. The commission sent letters and aerial photos to 173 landowners warning that their lives — and sometimes their addresses — could change, and asked for comments. Those comments are being used to shape legislation that should solve most of the resulting problems.
But an obvious fix is not in sight for Lewis Efird, who bought a gas station just south of what he thought was the state line in the early 1990s to take advantage of South Carolina’s significantly lower gas tax, as well as the ability to sell beer and fireworks. Unfortunately, the survey work showed conclusively that his pumps were in a part of North Carolina where gas is more expensive, beer sales are not allowed and fireworks are illegal. As he told commissioners in a public meeting, “Our business is going to be destroyed.”
The two states are expected to approve the boundary surveys and remedial legislation early in 2015, assuming they can solve Mr. Efird’s problem — several lawmakers have expressed concern over hurting a prominent small business. Whatever happens, the experience offers a potential model for interstate cooperation.
The Carolinas have shown that cooperation is cheaper than litigation. Sidney C. Miller, the boundary commission’s co-chairman from South Carolina, said 20 years of boundary resurveying had cost his state just a fraction of the bills from the 1990 Georgia lawsuit, not to mention lower levels of stress and vitriol.
Their experiment has also worked because it was handled by professional surveyors and other experts, kept legislators in the loop and involved affected citizens. Not all of them will be happy, but the public-hearing schedule, as well as a legislative-approval requirement, has kept the process transparent and minimized political intrigues.
Clearly, when you let able professionals handle complex problems and offer science-based solutions to well-informed politicians, anything is possible, even in 21st-century America.
Stephen R. Kelly is a visiting professor https://fds.duke.edu/db/Sanford/srk14 in the Sanford School of Public Policy at Duke University.