Road Department Corner Cards
Introduction
These unverified Road Department Corner Cards (RDCC) were prepared by the Deschutes County Road Department between 1967 and circa 1987. They show section, one-quarter and one-sixteenth corners with reference ties to nearby bearing objects. These records were apparently a Road Department in-house inventory of monuments. They are UNOFFICIAL and UNVERIFIED and should be used with caution. The majority of them should be beneficial to a surveyor’s corner research, but a few of them appear to be incorrect. Use these unverified records with extreme caution and be sure to collaborate and verify the information on them with other survey records and evidence in the field.
Collection
This collection is static – no additional corner cards are being prepared in this fashion. It consists of scanned images of:
- 29 index maps organized by Township and Range. These are 18” x 24” 1972 Metsker Map blue lines with the corner card numbers hand drawn on them.
- 548 Corner Cards ( 4” x 6” index cards) numbered “RDCC100” to “RDCC647”.
Background
The earlier, lower numbered Corner Cards appear to have been prepared in conjunction with various Road Department road surveys in the 1960s and 1970s.
According to employees who worked here in the 1980s the more recent cards were created as part of an on-going project to find PLSS corners throughout the county and set references to perpetuate their locations. This work was done during slow times in the road construction season.
These monuments were usually unverified. In many cases no research was performed before going out to a corner location, finding a likely monument, and then setting references to it and drafting up a card. Most of the cards do not have a date, a listing of crew members or citations for previous documents to verify the monument they noted and referenced. However, some of the cards show new monuments being set. A few of these cards may have been duplicated in our official Oregon Corner Restoration Record (OCRR) files.
Use
Despite some of the pitfalls stated above, we have had good luck using these cards to fill in a corner’s history and to make sense of found bearing trees that do not show up in other records. Even the cards which apparently tied incorrect monuments will give the researching surveyor a red flag that a double corner may have been existent at one time and a few record surveys or deeds may have relied on it. Astute surveyors will find these cards, along with our other Miscellaneous Records, invaluable research documents.
If you chose to cite one of these cards as a reference on a survey, you can use wording such as:
description card #100 by D.C.R.D. (unofficial record), located at the Deschutes County Road Dept. Engineering vault, circa 1980 corner references.
Like any other Miscellaneous Record, this information should be used as a research tool and not necessarily the final say in a corner’s or boundary’s location. As with other old notes, the corner and reference ties in these documents may have been superseded or nullified by more recent surveys, deeds or evidence.
See the DCRC Corner Cards at the Deschutes County Public Records Center Now
