Musgrove Evans and Johnston Township

Up ahead at the stop sign there is a very slight jog in the road.   It’s where Osborne Road in Barry county crosses Manning Lake Road.  Manning Lake Road forms the boundary between Barry and Johnstown townships.

Whenever I’m traveling on an east-west county road in Michigan and I come to a slight jog in the road at an intersection, I check to see if I’m at a township boundary.  Usually that’s what it is.  It’s where the original land surveys didn’t quite match up.    I’m not sure why such a small jog was allowed to stand, because at least some of the surveyor instructions called for surveyors to force them to match at township boundaries when the discrepancy was small.   Larger discrepancies were allowed to stand.

The original division of Barry Township into square mile sections was done by surveyor Sylvester Sibley.  Johnstown  Township, on the other side of the intersection, was done by Musgrove Evans, as were a few other townships further to the east.

Evans is a well known character in the history of Lenawee County.  He was one of the very first settlers, and there is a historical marker in front of his house, which still stands in Tecumseh.    In 1825 he did the survey of the Chicago Road, which before that was the Sauk Trail, and now is US-12.   In 1834 he and his family moved to Texas, where he did more surveying.   His son, Samuel, was killed at the Alamo in 1836.   Evans was a Quaker, as were many other settlers in Lenawee County.  But after the Alamo and his son’s death, he got involved in the fighting himself and has been listed as one of the “heroes” of the Battle of San Jacinto.

His surveying tools eventually found their way back to Michigan, I believe in the 1960s or thereabouts.    I saw them ten years ago at a museum in Tecumseh, and they have also been on display at the Michigan Historical Center in Lansing.  I’m not sure if that’s where they are now.

So he is an interesting character in local Michigan history.  But among Barry County surveyors, his name is not one that is honored.  I have been told, by a surveyor who shall remain anonymous, that his work here was almost fraudulent.  It wasn’t actually a fraud, because he did go over the ground and he put stakes in the ground.  But how he located his corners is something that mystifies the local surveyors.   Evans’ work still causes them difficulties to this day.

I would be reluctant to say, though, that his work had anything to do with the two section lines not matching up at the photo in the intersection.  I was under the impression that the discrepancies due to his work were a lot larger than that.

The source for some of the biographical information about Evans is Norman C. Caldwell’s,  “Surveyors of the Public Lands in Michigan 1806-2000″ (2001).