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Never heard of this but following because it seems interesting

"buried the lede" is a term in journalism. Never heard this term in the context of property and real estate.

Ya. J instructor would fail me for burying the lead.

In fact, I'm pretty sure that the whole reason it's spelled "lede" is to distinguish it from "lead" (as in, the metal), because of the latter's role in (historical) typesetting.

I believe early excplorers like LaSal did this in the 1600s in early America.

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To expand, "lede" is used instead of "lead", as in the "leading paragraph" of a story. Merriam Webster explains

> Spelling the word as lede helped copyeditors, typesetters, and others in the business distinguish it from its homograph lead (pronounced \led\ ), which also happened to refer to the thin strip of metal separating lines of type (as in a Linotype machine). Since both uses were likely to come up frequently in a newspaper office, there was a benefit to spelling the two words distinctly.

To "bury the lede" in the expression which has relatively recently gone mainstream, is to ignore the main fact and focus on an unimportant detail. Posters on r/amitheasshole, for instance, often bury the lede by omitting crucial details that show the situation in a very different light once revealed.

The French did this in the Great Lakes region around maybe 1740? They may have done the same along the Mississippi. Not that I really know but I’d suspect it was done to make up for the fact that they didn’t really have enough colonists to populate a lot of the areas they established trade networks in. I’m not sure where the practice came from though.

In terms of enforcement I think they mainly did it to “call dibs” before the English got there. Not that it really mattered when the Seven Years war broke out. That doesn’t answer your question but it’s all I got.

My dad found one in our yard (Picton, Ontario) years ago with "dieu et Mon droit" on it.

That is my understanding, the use of lede for this meaning was for instructions to the printer in such a way that inclusion is a typographic mistake.

For what it's worth, I owned a 1912 house in Chicago for about 20 years and found out that the property parcels were once delineated by burying slabs of lead. I found mine out buried by the alley - it was maybe 6" x 12" x 1/2 " and weighed a ton - but none of the my other neighbors were able to find/still had theirs. Just FYI.

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Surveyors have been burying metal markers to establish boundary lines for a long time. The Public Land Survey System started in 1785 in the US. I'm a real estate attorney and I regularly come across legal descriptions that refer to a buried rod, or an old axle, or some other metal object. A couple weeks ago I saw one from the 1800s that used an old gun barrel. It's still common practice for surveyors to set metal pins or rods into the ground to help people find boundary lines. Sometimes you'll see the head of these pins in the centerline of public roads.

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That's fantastic. Thanks for the new term. Interesting to know a form of this is still used.

I just googled "survey pins" which led me to "property pins" which led me to "survey markers" but none of them mention a historical use of lead plates.

I've gone to Wiki for the Public Land Survey System which says that they used wooden posts, trees, and rock piles for establishing "legally binding markers" but the burying of lead plates isn't mentioned.

Appreciated, this is definitely pertinent even if not the exact thing.

So a hundred years ago a form of this was still being used? That's fascinating. There's got to be some sort of documentation of this on the internet somewhere.

Despite the French language, that's England. Kinda cool to find that

I read the wiki on the U.S. Public Land Survey system in response to u/duncan345's comment, and apparently moving (or removing) property markers is still techincally a Federal offense in the U.S. (of which Picton, Ontario is admittedly not a part.) But if that isn't still being used as such, that might be of interest to someone somewhere.

Do you remember the dimensions of it?

The English did it too.

Oh really? In the Ohio Valley or elsewhere?

Thanks, it's mentioned here in wikipedia:

>At each point, a tin or copper plate bearing the French royal arms was nailed to a tree. Below, an inscribed leaden plate was buried, declaring the claims of France. This was a traditional European mode of marking territory

...explaining why the title of the post asks about Europe as well as North America. But it doesn't have a source attached for the "traditional European mode" claim.

But yeah, that's great evidence establishing that it least happened. It's even referred to as "The 'Lead Plate" Expedition."

>dieu et Mon droit

This is the motto of our Monarch (UK and Commonwealth). You can read more at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dieu_et_mon_droit

Moving USGS benchmarks is very much a Federal offense.

https://www.lsi-inc.us/is-it-illegal-to-move-a-survey-marker/

Moving survey staking and other markers depends on the situation and state.

That's really fascinating. Thank you for sharing!

It's the motto of the monarch of the United Kingdom and appears on Royal coat of arms of UK outside Scotland.

I know from my own research that this practice was used as far north as Russian Alaska, notably with plaques buried at Sitka in 1799. Whether the Russian Empire had the means to enforce such claims was another matter; as the costs of their colonial ventures mounted, Russian trading companies eventually abandoned much of their territory in modern day California and British Columbia.

Frontier explorers would sometimes leave similar messages by landmarks to mark milestones along their journey, although these were usually carved into stone rather than forged in metal. Alexander Mackenzie famously left a marker near the Pacific coast when his expedition became the first north of the Rio Grande to cross the continental divide (beating Lewis & Clark by over a decade).

They've actually needed to start updating coordinates of the markers due to continental drift in some places. They can be off by centimeters which can be ginormous legal fights.

The idea of markers to track boundaries goes back thousands of years. There are Biblical laws about not removing boundary markers.

The modern spelling of lede is super recent. When I was in my journalism program in the 1990s it was almost always “bury the lead.” It’s only after about 2000 that the industry switched over to the lede spelling.

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How did that come to be?

I don't know if its traditional, but lead is basically the least reactive (corroding) non-precious metal. So for applications where metal needs be buried in the ground for a long time, lead is a pretty good candidate for those unconcerned with soil toxicity.

Copper is another but its generally more expensive than lead for non-decorative monuments. Unsecured metal tends to get re-appropriated for other purposes...especially when stored in an inherently insecure place like a property line.

Nowadays, steel meets all the demands without poisoning the salamanders.

This page says it was first used in 1965 but I could see it taking a few decades to catch on everywhere.

Yes. I read the Jesuits or maybe the Diocese of Baltimore did this down the Ohio River Valley.

Have you heard of the Normans? Vous devriez l’ur demander.

William Plantagenet--a French noble--took the British crown in 1066. The British royal court spoke French for hundreds of years afterwards.

That wouldn’t surprise me. Things can have decades long backgrounds before they become commonly known.

It definitely wasn’t in use at my school, my internships, or my first couple jobs. It’s interesting that according to Merriam-Webster they didn’t recognize lede as an appropriate variant spelling till 2008. That vibes with my experience trying to stay in the journalism industry.

Oversimplifying a lot : Because kings of England were related to the kings of France and saw themselves as the rightful kings of France (see the 100 Years War) hence "mon droit"

other exemple : Richard the Lionheart, king of England, only spoke French and spent most of his time in his French estates or crusading

In the 1980s in California I put a lot of 2' lengths of rebar in property corners for new subdivisions and property line disputes in the SF Bay Area. I've seen everything in old surveys from old axles to even a giant pipe wrench once.

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Celeron did it too, when he led an expedition in 1749 to strengthen French claims to the Ohio River Valley

The expedition passed through my city...in fact, directly past the spot my house is in now...and buried a plate here. It's never been found

My property has a steel pin in each corner. Every time the property is sold it must be re-surveyed. Been over 20 years since the last one.

William of Normandy.

Geoffrey V was a Plantagenet

They carried lead along the oregon trail? The heaviest known substance of the time? To...mark corners of peoples home plots????

Please elaborate so this stops sounding crazy

They mined and purified this extremely heavy substance just to bury it for someone centuries later to dig up? tf were they thinking

couldnt they like chisel a rock with their initials? digging up lead ore from a mine and refining it just to bury it for centuries sounds expensive still.

Since metal detection was invented I think metal has been preferred to rock for that reason.

But I think you are right that older markers were generally stone.

Furthermore, there are specialized tools like the Schonstedt Maggie (and similar) that are technically magnetic gradiometers -- largely referred to as "pinfinders" -- which are used by legal surveyors to find these buried corner markers on a regular basis. Doesn't help with lead, but anything with iron in it generally works.

My father did surveying part time to earn extra money. He was quite good at it. He always looked for the metal property markers at corners, hilltops, or on long property lines. Typically they were sections of 1/2 pipe or re-bar.

Also, a survey marker will often have a soft metal cap, so that the ‘exact’ position can be marked on the cap. Most survey markets have an indent in the top for a surveyor’s level staff to sit on the exact position. I wouldn’t be at all surprised if this was still made of lead

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Lead was often a by-product of silver/zinc mining. It's also not so difficult to refine.

Different French expedition, but there was a lead plate buried overlooking the Missouri River at what is now known at the Verendrye Site in South Dakota in 1743. It was discovered during the early part of the 1900s.

https://wikipedia.org/wiki/Verendrye_Site

I think this is confusing the journalism term "burying the lead" which can be spelled alternatively as lede and the word lede in the sense of leode, leod, or ledd which referred to the people tied to an allotment of land. You would be given land and lede, meaning the land and the labor of the people who lived there as your vassals. I've cut and pasted the OED entry below. But "Burying the lead/lede" starts showing up in the 1950s if you check it's etymology. Lede in the sense of the vassals and land is an Old English word dating to the 14th century.

Also, I've done a decent amount of reading on law of discovery and the development of property rights and surveying in the US, so this doesn't rule out anywhere else. I've also read a little on the Spanish. I've read a ton of old deeds from pioneer days in the US. I've never seen a buried lead marker and it doesn't really make sense. You want your claim to be visible to others so normally things were nailed to trees, scratched in rocks, or made somehow visible to others. You would do stuff like build a small fort to show that you've put labor into the area, even if you're not actually using it yet. But you wanted to create a visible sign of occupation and boundary to give other's notice.

And if you read old deeds, before a surveyor come come and mark everything off in terms of longitude, latitude, and chain length, they refer to visible landmarks. They'll say stuff like "Eastern boundary is X creek from from the creek branch, south 600 paces to the large oak tree. Southern boundary is from along X creek continuing to fence line of Sanders farm." The important thing again is that the boundaries are visible.

Not having it visible wouldn't help anyone show anything. The other problem is that the ground moves. Depending on where you buried something, how much water goes through the area, and the slope, where you bury stuff is going to move.

b. plural. In the alliterative phrase land and lede, i.e. land and vassals or subjects.

OE Andreas (1932) 1321 Hafast nu þe anum eall getihhad land ond leode.
c1330 Arth. & Merl. 86 And gaue him bothe land and lede To help his childer after his day.
1377 W. Langland Piers Plowman B. xv. 520 When Constantyn..holykirke dowed With londes and ledes lordeshipes and rentes.
?c1475 Sqr. lowe Degre 135 I wyll forsake both land and lede, And become an hermyte.
a1500 (▸?c1400) Sir Triamour (Cambr.) (1937) l. 1269 Y make the myn heyre Of londe and of lede.
a1500 Merchant & Son l. 7 in W. C. Hazlitt Remains Early Pop. Poetry Eng. (1864) I. 133 He was a grete tenement man, and ryche of londe and lede.

I work for a land survey firm in Ontario. It is also a federal offense in Canada.

The Criminal Code of Canada R.S. 1985, c. C-46 under Part XI, Sec. 442 and 443 states, "Every one who wilfully pulls down, defaces, alters or removes anything planted or set up as the boundary line or part of the boundary line of land is guilty of an offence punishable on summary conviction."

This very heavy substance that was used in a variety of manners throughout the home and farm … inside plumbing was sealed with lead, firearms used lead projectiles, fishermen used lead weights, etc. Lead can be easily melted and shaped and imprinted with wording.

Yes, OP is aware of that. Read the post. They were manually sorting out and excluding search results where the "lead" in question was the metal, rather than the salient fact in a news piece, and noticed a lot of references to physical burying of lead to mark property boundaries.

Survey markers (the caps) are made of brass or aluminum these days, for the most part. Most are aluminum but the higher end ones, like USGS markers, are made of brass.

I would think earthquakes would be more problematic.

There are field bounderies in England that have been the same since the Iron Age. I love looking at old maps and seeing roads that have been there for 160 years (In the USA that is a long time).

You are just describing the differences between a meets and bounds system and system of townships and ranges (a projected grid). Meets and bounds are the european and british way of property marking and the township/range grid system is an American invention that is much more efficient! Thank you Mr. Jefferson.

Lead does not decay very rapidly. It is also soft, you can scratch words onto it. You don't need much to mark a corner. I don't know about the Oregon Trail, but it was used through the ages.

What's the difference?

The point of the meets and bound, or later township and ranges, is just to show that it was important that property be visible. You had to have outward signs of occupation. Someone can't be trespassed or ousted if there's no outward sign they were possessing the land tortiously. Part of trespassing is that you are occupying the land in knowing violation of the owner's consent. So, hidden markers would hinder your ability to oust a trespasser.

people were saying these were large, 1/2" thick, foot or two wide slabs in the comments. how else would they find them later?

This isn't' really true. In both survey systems the markings or pins or corners, etc only have meaning when combined with a legal document. In meets and bounds systems an 'x' carved into a fold of a tree, a burned wooden stake buried at a corner, an x on a rock are not warnings or visible signs of occupation. These are the exact opposite! These are pretty hidden and hard to see and only connect to each other when interpreted and found using a deed or legal document that describes them and their relationship to each other. It's no different in brand new developments today, the survey markers are buried and not meant to be seen. It's not a sign of occupation in any form, it's just a physical claim to land as described in a legal document.

George Washington carved his mark into stone when he surveyed Natural Bridge in Virginia.

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back when they were alive my grandparents burried a 6 foot metal rebar pole with L metal profiles horizontally welded to it as a marker, only 1ft above ground was left.

I wonder if the use of lead died out due to environmental effects.

Did anyone ever come over while you were surveying and offer you a bribe to move the line a bit for them?

> Surveyors have been burying metal markers to establish boundary lines for a long time.

Why would you bury things that are supposed to serve as markers? Why not put a plaque qt ground level, or drive a pin down vertically until it's half buried, or use a stone marker above the ground?

I know and I was just pointing out that any other reference would be VERY obscure it would seem. Hence my comment, "(I) Never heard this term in the context..."

They were traditionally buried so they wouldn't be disturbed. They'd record its position and then put it deep enough that people weren't likely to disturb it with a plow or things like that.

Things above ground are easily moved, intentionally tampered with, or removed by someone who doesn't realize the significance. Burying it makes it a more secure option, especially when you want it to stay put for decades or centuries. People who are looking for it can easily find it with the right tools, but it won't be bothersome to people who don't need access to it.

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Not a clue. One wonders what they were thinking.

> 160 years (In the USA that is a long time).

In some parts of it, maybe, but hardly all of it. There's a street in my town that's 400 years old.

My mother recently bought a piece of property where one corner of the property was described as being bounded by a “buried axle”, and I was in fact able to locate said buried axle! I will say I was surprised to find that an actual axle shaft had been buried in the ground.

If you have ever seen the description of a USATF certified race course, segments and turns are described as "x feet from the nail." That nail is those metal surveyor markers.

Not the one you asked, but continental drift is a very slow process and would likely move all the land around the marker identically, with the net effect of no difference.

An earthquake OTOH would have the definite possibility of moving the marker itself thus changing the boundary lines.

Too cool, I like seeing Roman roads that are made better than our pothole riddled tracks we call roads.

I would think any use of lead plates as boundary markers would have died out as iron (a ferromagnetic material and thus more easily located with a detector) became cheaper than lead.

The change in earths magnetic field direction has lead to a shift in thr direction of New England's famous stone field border walls.

The USA is still a "young" country. We have a poor sense of time here. If a building is 50 years old it is ancient. Sadly we do not build to last. Many old beautiful buildings are torn down for parking lots, mass transit is abysmal. You have to have a car to do any traveling, walking is not possible, stores are too far apart.

Well, fuck. My second thought was going to be cost concerns. Guess I should've gone with that lol I just don't know which came first, chicken or egg.

Can you share more information about this, or a source?

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I love that story, incredible it was ever found and preserved.

Can I interest you in holloways? Paths used so much they've created, basically, open tunnels over the years.

If the person trying to move the boundary line doesn't know about the buried marker, then it is much easier to call them on their bullshit, basically. A fence can be moved and rocks relocated, but unless you know where the underground markers are and can dig up and rebury them...

Thank you!!!!

to be fair, the heaviest vehicle during roman times was a ox cart. with cars becoming heavier and heavier they put more wear on the street than romans ever could

I can explain this a bit as I learned a bit of orienteering from youth groups/military experience. So when working with a compass you have to actually modify the declination a bit. All this is rotating the angle markers. To determine that requires a little bit of math. This is because True North location actually moves over the years. So what he's stating is that the bearing to the location has shifted. As if you had a compass set to 0 declination which means 0 points at true north the bearing would be different.

​

Quick explanation on what a bearing is. So when using a map the lines straight north are considered 0 degrees. East is 90, South is 180 and West is 270. So by drawing a line from one point to another you can use a protractor or other angle measuring tool to determine the angle.

​

If the map is new and set properly to true north there is no declination set on the compass. So what you do is you rotate the right so that the angle you determined from the map is set to the front of the compass. You then rotate the compass(typically by moving yourself as you point it outwards from your body) till the north on the magnet and north on the reading align. You then know you are pointing at your bearing.

​

With declination you have to adjust that angle a bit(usually compasses have a key to do it so you don't have to adjust on calculation). So on an old map you calculate declination and then when you shoot your bearing you'll still be pointed to the right location. However if you didn't calculate for declination cause true north moved you'll be facing a few degrees off.

​

I'm sorry if this explanation is confusing. It's typically best done with a physical compass and map to show what i'm talking about. I tried my best to do it in writing.

Secret Terminus cult ritual.

It's like the eleusinian mysteries

But not

<_<

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Lead? Ive heard of copper, tin or bronze or even steel but never lead. It started when the French were there as a snub to the English... it didnt stick for either of them once the United States formed.

It died out cause we got more sophisticated ways to measure property lines and how to grant them.

I dont know of any legal precedent for the old European style or claims that go that far back but marking land with metal was common and still pops up occasionally to this day due to land inheritences and whatnot.

You might even hear stories on other reddits avout neighbors stepping on each others toes due to ignorance or maliciousness about where property lines are. Its the primary reason we have Tree Law.

I wonder what keeps people from just hammering their own rebar down and claiming that's where the line is. Wouldn't even have to remove the first one, just create enough confusion to get away with adjusting the new fence line.

A physical compass and 2 or more maps of the same area some years apart, it would seem

As an old chainman, I've never seen anything other than a legal sized pin used for land identification (Canada,) so this sounds pretty interesting; I've also never heard of buried lead plates.

Well, for a start, you'd have to be stupid to tell anyone you did it. So, just theoretically speaking, if anyone did this - you simply might not know because they didn't get caught.

Yep, I've worked as a survey assistant (or "chainie" due to the old chains of measurement) in Australia and they still mark boundaries in relation to buried galvanised iron posts, usually 25cm long and buried with a sledgehammer

We still do this is Sweden sometimes. Maybe not lead but some sort of plate

Thanks. I hadn't considered bad faith actors.

I appreciate the answer!

Roman roads are interesting. Astonishing engineering, a really well-built stone road can last for millennia.

But you wouldn't want to drive on one. Stone pavers give a hell of a rough ride at any real speed, and stone is deadly slick when it's wet. For cars you really need something that's very smooth and slightly tacky, and unfortunately asphalt is the best we've come up with so far. I'll take dealing with potholes over a 30MPH top speed.

(And if we did drive on Roman roads, I don't think they'd last so long under regular 18-wheeler traffic.)

Dropping this here because it's related, but there's no good segue in the comments yet:

There is a longstanding Wiccan practice of burying iron nails at property lines to 'pin it down' and protect from negative magic

Nope. We were a civil engineering firm, paid well, above board, and everything was plotted by and on instruments based on county records.

Doesn't work because every property corner was based on county documents and surveys or plots from established benchmarks. For instance "corner 1 is x.xxx distance at xxx.xx.xx degrees, minutes and seconds from county benchmark 17B located in the middle of y road, x.xxx distance from the northeast corner of y road and z street". Benchmark could be a nail through a washer in the asphalt, a bronze disc set in concrete, and so on. With proper instrumentation and trained surveyors, you get the point down to 1/100 of a foot (yeah, tenths of a foot and tenths of a tenth)

Edit: and we always used county or state benchmarks and NEVER used PG&E benchmarks because for some reason most of them were in the wrong place.

For newer developments there's usually a plat map that gives dimensions along the edges of the lot. I think they store those at city hall somewhere. So one stake being out of place or lost wouldn't be a huge problem. And for larger plots all the states not on the east coast follow a fairly standard system. So if your land boundary is on the range line or town line or some quarter section line then that's a known thing and stake position isn't going to matter as much.

With that said, what really matters is whether it's the kind of thing that's worth going to court over or bringing in a surveyor. But even if it isn't right now it could still be a problem in the future. Stuff does get errantly built outside the bounds of peoples' property and that's a legal mess when somebody discovers it.

As another said, every marker has references (other markers) that include exact distances and descriptions. It would be trivial to figure out that someone was lying

You can get up to about 250 years old on the west coast, e.g. the California missions. There is literally nothing older than that since AFAIK no indigenous buildings have survived that long.

At least not in California. I wonder if the PNW has some longhouses or something.

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I think the cave dwellings in New Mexico are one of the oldest surviving human habitats in North America.

Maybe some of those mounds in... Kansas? Too

New Mexico is not on the west coast ;)

But yeah those are good additions to the list. I've seen the Pueblo buildings and they're impressive.

Of course if you go further south, there are tons of stone buildings and pyramids in Mexico and Guatemala.

In Seattle, a 100 year old building is a historic landmark.

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Adding on to this I used to live in northern Virginia and had the library archivist look up my neighborhood as far back as he could.

Oh some of the land plots!

"Starting from the blasted oak travel north by north west 300 paces to a burried pipe near the road...."

In my neighborhood today if you look at the sidewalks you can see survey pins embedded in there.

Lead holds up better in soil than most older ferrous metals. Also, it is easier to inscribe notations on lead plates. IIRC, there was a case years ago in southwestern Pennsylvania where someone dummied up some fake lead plates, "discovered" them, and fooled a local historical society.

What are PG&E benchmarks?

PG&E is a utility company in Northern California(pacific gas and electric)

Yea I have metal rods marking my property off now. Spray painted neon orange and neon orange vinyl maeking tape tied on each one.

Ahhh thanks!

TIL, thanks!

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So that’s why the ancient Babylonian symbols of kingship were the rod and the ruler.

Ruler I can imagine why, it established the length of the foot or unit of measurement. The rod I was not sure about…but maybe they buried it to mark the border of the field.

In ancient Egypt the symbol was a shepherds crook. Why didn’t they also use a rod? Probably because due to the annual Nile floods burying one would have been useless.

It's common in older cities. For example in Arizona, in cities like Bisbee and Tombstone, you can find multiple section corners and property corners set in close proximity to each other by different surveyors. In one case I know of 6 different pins meant to be the same point all spread out over an 8sqft area. How do you resolve this? Well a surveyor has to dig through records and try to figure out which point to hold, OR in many cases you might have to go testify in court for it to get settled because property owners will sue each other. In many cases we had to spend a day collecting control data and then had to calculate the correct pin location and set our own more accurate pin with our survey data on it. It can get complicated!

Surveyor errors are actually common and have led to many a state/national border or property line dispute and ongoing design, infrastructure layout issues, etc. to this day all over the country!

You aren't talking about the Mormons, are you?

The basic idea is that magnetic north moves around over time (magnetic north and the north pole are not the same location). So if your boundary line is defined as a north south line, and you look at a compass to figure out where to put your wall, over time the direction that wall points relative to older walls, will change.

So present day scientists can use the orientation of the walls to track changes in the location of magnetic north pole.

https://theconversation.com/old-stone-walls-record-the-changing-location-of-magnetic-north-112827

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Side note, Illinois was experimenting with a cork surface. We drove on some on Interstate 55, it was a smooth ride at the time. This was in 2017.

An entire benchmark system by Pacific Gas and Electric. Some are just recorded using county benchmarks with PG&E surveys (which would often get you way off where they were supposed to be) or benchmarks put in by PG&E survey crews, which were just as likely to be in the wrong place according to county planning maps.

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Yeah, utility companies are pretty terrible about starting points and property corners. What's with that? I was doing title searches in a small town and by the time I was done, the county gave me a month of free deed copies in exchange for my legal descriptions. Because they were accurate compared to the railroad and electric company markers. For the the square mile around the town square. That next year the tax assessor's database was correct for the first time in a century

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A "rod" is actually a unit of land measurement. A rod is 16.5 feet. It's an old school surveyor's tool. I've heard that the measurement dates back to the Roman empire, where the soldiers were also road builders. In the version I was told, 16.5 feet was about the length of a Roman pike.

"Rods" were often a fractional unit of a "chain." A surveyor's chain is another old school tool. Chains were 66 feet in length. A chain is the same length as 4 rods. Back in the day when surveyors had more basic tools, a surveyor would start at a landmark, like a fence post, or a tree, or a metal marker. Then the surveyor would measure their compass heading and stretch out their 66 foot chain and take their measurements. When the distance got too small for the chain they would switch to the rod. A legal description written using this method would read something like "Commence at a fence post on the Southwest corner of the old Grantham tract, in the Southeast quarter of Section 32, Township 3 North, Range 4 East, thence run North 44 degrees, 35 minutes West 14 chains, 3 3/4 rods to the centerline of Redd Creek, thence run in a Northerly direction along the centerline of said creek..."

In my experience you deal with this by doing a thorough title search and getting an ALTA survey, which would show the existence of several conflicting landmarks. Hopefully you can then get a boundary line agreement with the adjoining land owners. Usually the neighbors are fine with accepting whatever they perceived the boundary line to be. Then you record the boundary agreement in your county land records so that future title searchers know the problem has been cleared up.

I dunno. There is a LOT of old knowledge that no one has published on the internet and is found only in books.

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It's been quite a while since I've seen it, but I would guess it was 3-4 inches in diameter, maybe half an inch thick.

Sixty years before Lewis and Clark explored the Missouri River - the French laid claim to the country when they "buried the lede".

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Verendrye_Site

https://www.southdakotamagazine.com/verendrye-plate