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The 1760s plat map with a fake river that sent me down a three day rabbit hole
I picked up a photocopy of a 1764 land grant map off eBay for $15 last month. The surveyor drew a river running through the middle of a parcel in what is now eastern Ohio. I tried to match it to modern topography and nothing lined up. After three days of digging through county records and old deed books online, I found out the river was drawn in as a joke. The original surveyor had a feud with the landowner and sketched a fake waterway to mess with the boundary lines. It actually held up in court for like 80 years before anyone questioned it. Has anyone else run into a map that was flat out wrong on purpose or just lazy? What was the dumbest error you found on an old map?
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nancy_miller3mo ago
That surveyor must have been a real piece of work. Fifty dollars is a steal for that story alone, but eighty years is wild, youd think someone would have measured the water flow or hit bedrock by then. I once found a 1907 railroad map of western Kansas that showed a whole county road going right through a salt marsh, and it stayed on official records for decades just because everyone copied the same bad source. It drives me nuts how these errors just get passed down like family heirlooms, nobody ever checks the original ground. So what finally broke the case for you, a deed description that mentioned a dry creek bed or something?
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