What Are Plat Maps?
Did you ever wonder why today’s towns look the way they do? The look of the downtown area, with its square blocks, originates centuries ago, when the country was first dividing what would eventually become a large portion of the United States. Beginning in the late eighteenth century, these unexplored lands were surveyed under the Public Land Survey System. This is a rectangular survey system that required the platting of lands according to particular distance; it replaced earlier systems that measured a given piece of land according to its dimensions from landmarks, allowing for non-square parcels. The original city or village plat began with townships and sections of land, with each section being one mile square, and each township containing 36 such sections, for an area measuring six miles square. Historic plat maps are maps, drawn to scale, showing the divisions of the city’s land. These show the individual blocks, and usually the individual lots after the blocks were subdivided fo
