Following Footsteps Once upon a Time.

Hi Everyone,

Every State has a rich history about how and when and what it took to become a State.

Just like our Countrys' history on how our founding Fathers and the struggles it took to settle this land.

As we all know it called on it's surveyors, George Washington, Thomas Jefferson and Abraham Lincoln.

Just to name those that everyone knew as well as they were also presidents.

They fought other Countries and the native people who did not know what a Flag meant.

Because they had no Flag. But this story is about a State that was first a Country and a man who had come to live there.

And about the people who came to help and chose to stay and become Texans and to die trying to be one,

even before it became a Country.When the new land was to be divided just like our Country

this new Country, again called on it's surveyors that it could not pay with cash but offered to pay

them with land. And this story is about one such person that lived in those times.

When I first joinned this site, I met a surveyor from Texas who loved the history of surveying and

also the history of his State. In a discussion about throwing a chain, I mentioned a vara, thinking

I was talking about a ban steel tape that I also have called a chain, not knowing that he was talking about a

Gunters type chain. I told him the last one of those I saw was at the feet of a Statue on Preston Road in Frisco TX.

This person is now a good friend of mine and many of you know him, Johnny Ingram.

And he runs The Museum of Measurement and Time .

The statue was a surveyor who was in the Texas Army and had been given the task of laying out a road

from Little River to the Red River as in what is now Austin to Oklahoma. But read on how and what he did

before and after this task all about William G. Cooke soldier and surveyor, when Texas was Born.

And Johnny I will always look up to you as a mentor of surveyors and Texas History.

Where are you surveying?