Barefoot Bob
By Jim Palmer Jr.

Some years ago I was with a surveyor and a land owner while attempting to show the owner his property corners.  The survey had been done many years before but the old pipes used for markers were buried under several inches of duff.  As we trudged through the brush of the remote lot, we were confronted by an interesting character who I later dubbed, Bare Foot Bob.  
   
 He was bare-chested and bare-footed, clad only in a pair of ripped jeans that revealed the fact that he didn’t have underwear.  The only other accoutrement was the AK47 rifle strapped across his shoulder.  He gruffly demanded that we get off his property.  The surveyor, accustomed to this type of confrontation, calmly took charge and told the ruffian that we were not on his property.  He deftly calmed the belligerent man and convinced him that we could show him exact property corner markers, which we quickly did and of course the location of said markers were a surprise to the bare footed stranger.

     The point of telling you this story is to make the assertion that most property owners really don’t know where their property boundaries are located.  They may be very adamant about where they think they are, even referencing old fences as boundaries, but the truth is that most people really don’t know.  

     A humorous but true internet article by Neil Shelton goes like this, “If you’ve ever wondered over the deed to your homestead or the strange designations you’ve seen in your real estate tax bill, you’ve come face to face with a legal description.  Ever since man started slicing up the earth and deciding which pieces of it belonged to whom, there has been a need for defining exactly where any given piece of land might lay.  In early Britain, this was handled in a memorable fashion: the policy was to take a young child from the neighborhood, lead him one by one to the corners of the tract of land in question then give him a severe thrashing at each location.  The theory was that the child would long remember each spot (if beaten with sufficient gusto) and could testify to its location long into the future.”   

     Surveyors can easily re-mark an old survey or create a new survey which is well worth the money.  When you purchase property be sure to include a survey as part of your contingent items.  That knowledge will give you peace of mind!