> Next, early, often quite uneducated landowners could be confident in the location of such as roads, creeks and blazed trees, and yet not completely trust the surveyors or their instruments, especially when those surveyed lines seemed to vary from the described boundaries by which they had purchased the land.

If you go into most courthouses in Virginia and probably other states you will still find land being bought and sold using metes and bounds descriptions from 100+ years ago with distances in poles with approximations of acreage that can be widely different from what actually exists.  And you also get
transcription errors where the lawyer/clerk has omitted lines of the description to the point of where you can't figure out where the property lines are supposed to be.

John Garrett

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