ABSTRACT
European settlement and changes of land use Before land could be properly taken up by settlers, it had to be obtained from the Indians by treaty (Read, 1941), surveyed into parcels suitably sized for farming, and then suitably organized to permit the formation of townships and counties. With this done, public land could pass into private hands, a process termed a “land patent.” Nearly all of the Hill Country was surveyed under the US rectilinear land survey whereby the land was surveyed into rectangles, at least as closely as could be done on the surface of a sphere (Thrower, 1960; H. Johnson, 1976, 2010). Stemming from the ordinances of 1784, 1785, and 1787 and largely from Thomas Jefferson’s Enlightenment ideas of creating small agricultural landholders, the rectilinear survey became a model of Enlightenment thought in terms of its logic, fairness, and reproducibility (Figure 2.1). Note that the basic unit of survey is the section, which was 1 square mile or 640 acres (2.6 km2), but which could be subdivided into many rectilinear permutations. An adequate farm for the Midwest was thought to be about 160 acres (64 ha) or a quarter section, but, depending on the wealth and intentions of the patentee, various-sized options were available, sometimes with all the land lots not contiguous.
