Each of these subdivisions here is a smaller square called a section. Okay, so section, I'll bring it up, is one mile by one mile, an area one. Square.
Now we're going to subdivide even smaller and the trouble with subdividing one is that now we're getting fractional and people don't like fractions. So at this point we're going to switch from square miles to a smaller unit of area, acres. Many of you know how many acres are in a square mile.
That's actually a useful number you should tuck away in the back of your head. Equals One square mile equals 640 acres. I know that sounds like a weird number, but 640 is a wonderful number. You can divide it by four, and divide it by four, and divide it by four.
You can keep on going for a long time before you come to anything that isn't a whole number. Okay, I'd like you to remember this. It's useful in the real world. When you're listening to the news, When you hear that there's a fire burning up by the Los Angeles Zoo in the Hollywood Hills and it's 10 acres. Is that big or small?
It's tiny. When you hear about that fire burning out in the San Bernardino Mountains that's now 23,000 acres. Whoa. That's...
multiple square miles. Okay, so knowing how many acres there are in a square mile gives you an idea of what these numbers mean. Okay, so one square mile. The government was not about to sell an area of land that big to anybody. They're going to divide it up and make it smaller.
Very simply, quartered. Each section. The quarters named by the points of the compass.
North-east, quarter. The north-west, quarter. The south-west, quarter. And the south-east, quarter. By the way, this section we're using here, that was section 10, wasn't it?
Okay. Alright, so one of these squares, a quarter section, okay, the north-west. South-west, South-east, this one, the North-east quarter.
This is a half a mile by half a mile. The area is a half times a half, which is one quarter of a square mile. But let's keep it in acres, 640. divided by 4, 160 acres. So this, a quarter section, this is the area that the government sold to an incoming settler or family for a farm. A quarter section, half a mile by half a mile, 160 acres.
Unfortunately, the government back east didn't really understand climate variations, rainfall, stuff like that. And they parceled out the land everywhere the same way. A quarter section of land in the Ohio Valley makes a real nice farm. You can grow pretty much any crop you want.
You can have some grazing land. Everything you could want. for a family. A quarter section of land near Bakersfield, dry as a bone, you can probably run half a dozen cattle on it, if you're lucky. So, this didn't work out that well, but that's how it was done.
Our settler, who has bought this land... will want to grow some crops. If you remember, I'm sure you learned somewhere about crop rotation.
You have to grow different crops each year, plus you're going to want different crops to feed yourself. You don't want to just grow the same thing all the time. So the farmer would subdivide his land into four big fields which are quarter-quarter sections.
Those are numbered the exact same way. North-East Quarter, North-West Quarter, South-West Quarter, South-East Quarter. He's probably going to put his, build his farmhouse somewhere, his home somewhere here. Okay, those quarter...
Quarter sections are what? That was a half mile. They're one quarter by one quarter mile. So their area is 40 acres. You notice if you wanted to you could quarter it one more time.
down to 10. This smallest division here, the quarter quarter section, the 40 acre area, has kind of passed into literature and into the language. If you read books you'll find stories where the farmer's wife greets the visitor and says oh you'll find my husband out plowing the northeast 40. Why 40? 40 acres, quarter quarter section, one of his big fields.
Over at PCC, the area up in the northeast corner of the campus where we have all the trade buildings, is often referred to by older staff members as the back 40. Again, 40. Why 40? 40 acres, the final subdivision in the public land survey. So here's the diagram in your book. I already told you I have serious reservations about this part of it because this isn't a neat little square. This continues on all the way to the state line, to the ocean, or beyond.
But it does show how the tiers, these horizontal strips of land each six miles wide, and the ranges, the north-south strips of land six miles wide, intersect to create townships. One township looks like this, six miles by six miles, and it's divided into 36 one-mile sections, numbered so. Any one of those sections, here it is, one mile by one mile, area one square mile or 640 acres, is divided into quarter sections, northeast, northwest, southwest, and southeast. Quarter sections of 160 acres, and each quarter section can be divided into quarter-quarter sections.
This one, therefore, is the southwest quarter of the northeast quarter of section 14 in Township T3 South, R2 East. This is why American fields, wherever mountains don't get in the way, are all square and are all lined up north, south, east, west. This is the picture in your textbook, but anywhere you fly and you look out of the plane window, you'll see the very same pattern. sections, quarter sections, and quarter-quarter sections are the three sizes of fields.
Most of the homes are along the section boundaries. A few of them are along the section midlines but they're all near the edges of the individual farms which are the quarter sections. Okay so here is our settler's farm. He's divided into the four more. He's got his farmhouse over here.
When he wants to leave does he ride his horse, drive his buggy across the middle of his field and then across his neighbour's fields. Because this is somebody else's farm. No, of course he doesn't. The owner of that farm will probably come out with a shotgun if he's riding through his crops. What would he do?
He'd go around his field and then he'd go along the boundaries between his farm and the next farm and the boundary between the next farm and the next farm. Okay, and then he might turn up this direction. Okay.
So the section boundaries and the midsection lines are where people traveled. They developed into tracks and trails, wheel ruts from people's carts. Eventually they became roads.
In more modern times, some of those roads got paved, and this is why we now, anywhere that the topography allows, we have this grid-like pattern of east-west roads half a mile apart, north-south roads one mile or half a mile apart. Eventually, this guy probably sells his farm to a developer. to build on. So within this area we wind up with the builder puts in roads going any direction that he wants and builds houses but there are straight roads, the major roads run around and so as cities spring up they are divided up in this same section pattern. And you can see that right here in Long Beach.
Okay, we have roads like Lakewood, Clarke is the midline, okay, Bellflower, Woodruff, Palo Verde, Studebaker. And going the other way, Carson, Wardlow, Spring, Willow, Stearns. Half a mile apart. following the section boundaries and the section middles.