I'm currently in the reading room of the
American Antiquarian Society in Worcester, Massachusetts, looking into their amazing collection of printed materials related to early American surveying. Most of their published materials date to after 1800, which is when I want to wrap up my story. But as part of that effort to tell the story of the colonial surveyor, I need to get a better sense of how surveying, and surveyors, changed in the early republican period, too.
One example of a mid-19th century text in their collections is James Pedder's
Farmers' Land-Measurer, or Pocket Companion, which went through a number of editions. The first edition appears to have been published in Philadelphia in 1842. The AAS holds editions from 1853 and 1854, which were published in New York.
What I like most is its cover, which you can also see in this
online edition available on Archive.org (from the 1855/1856 edition).
