Change in the Western Reserve

Map from 1826 of the Connecticut Western Reserve, which became Northeast Ohio

Chaining the wilderness

While early surveyors in North America used a system of metes and bounds that divided the land along its natural contours, Gen. Moses Cleaveland's party laid down an artificial grid that divided the land into 5-mile by 5-mile squares. Each square was identified as a numbered "township" in a numbered "range." Initially, this work was carried out only on land east of the Cuyahoga River, since at this time the river marked the western boundary of the United States.

Cleaveland's party chose the grid system for several reasons. The first was to divide the land equitably amongst the stockholders of the Connecticut Land Company. In addition, the grid would facilitate the sale of the land to the general public and provide long-term security of title for each parcel.

The resulting checkerboard bore no relationship whatsoever to the natural features of the land. In some places, the rigid survey lines took the surveyors through dense swamps. Atwater writes: "On the 56th mile is a Cranberry swamp&so miry that it is dangerous to attempt and difficult to perform a passage through either by man or beast." At other times, heavy underbrush obstructed their efforts. "The bushes are Thorns, Plums, Crabapples, Hazelnut ... all united in their branches which very much hindered our progress." Only where the grid intersected Lake Erie and the Cuyahoga River did it yield to the natural contours of the landscape.

Thus, while the grid system of surveying sped the transfer of land, it was divorced from the features of the land. By imposing a new logic on the natural landscape in the Cuyahoga Bioregion, the surveyors launched a process that would increasingly distance human inhabitants from the natural world around them. Responsibility for this separation lay not with the surveyors themselves, but rather with the mind set of their culture as a whole, which maintained a view of land ownership that contrasted sharply with that of the indigenous inhabitants.

Benjamin Hitchings
(from an essay about the 1796 land survey of the Western Reserve in The Greater Cleveland Environment Book)

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Account of the early surveys of Cleveland from 1884

While the grid system of surveying sped the transfer of land, it was divorced from the features of the land. By imposing a new logic on the natural landscape in the Cuyahoga Bioregion, the surveyors launched a process that would increasingly distance human inhabitants from the natural world around them.