Many of our founding fathers started their careers as surveyors. Along with providing an essential service, surveying was a very profitable trade in eighteenth century America. Surveyors would purchase newly opened land from the Crown and sell tracts to settlers at higher prices. This led to some resentment and suspicion by settlers – but one surveyor remained popular throughout his surveying career – and beyond.

Surveyors including George Washington, Thomas Jefferson and Abraham Lincoln, were key to establishing the United States as a nation. Surveying in the 1700s and 1800s was both arduous and perilous. For example, one of Washington’s contemporaries, William Crawford, met a tragic end at the forefront of western expansion of European settlers in lands controlled by Native Americans.

“Across 2 expansive wars and 2 transformative peace treaties, the surveyors eye changed the image of America in the British Atlantic world.” - Max Edelson is a professor of history at the University of Virginia.

It’s hard to overstate how important surveying was to the establishment of the United States – three of our presidents were surveyors, as well as six of the signers of the Declaration of Independence. But even before there were presidents, surveying and cartography played an essential role in the fight for independence.