[or-roots] Named townships

[Leslie Chapman]

Well since nobody has taken up my gauntlet on this topic I have spent some
time trying to track down the convention of naming townships. So far I have
determined that the relationship between named "townships" and the townships
that Richard Smith and I deal with in our work is mostly that they are
pronounced the same, and can "usually" be defined by land surveyor
terminology.

For an example of this go to; http://www.grandlake.net/darkeman/twps.html

there you can see "township" maps which incidentally will also tell you who
owned what land in Darke Co., Ohio in 1967 and somewhere on that site I
think they also have 1880.

If you look at these you will notice that they typically span two or more
survey townships in each direction, but not by whole townships.

One thing I didn't consider when rattling on about this earlier is that the
term "township" as a political entity comes to us from England and possibly
further back in the language. Gee there's a novel idea; look it up!
According to the dictionary the term comes from old english, and in England
was a political unit containing a village, church and parish or some such,
also known as a division of a "hundred" whatever that was. In U.S. and
Canada is usually a division of a county which by definition I assume would
also mean a division of a borough, though I still think there are some
places where the division is township without counties, but I might be
wrong.

Well hopefully Pat can get that citation, I couldn't come up with anything
searching on "named township" or "Naming townships" only produced a piece of
North Carolina legislation about "not naming any between 1998 and 2000 which
apparently had something to do with preventing gerrymandering.  Also a
comment that it is a "convention" to name counties and townships for War
heroes, hence eighteen "Montgomery" Counties in the U.S.

Just to give you an idea how many of the darn things there are, googling the
word township gets you 46,100,000 hits, and I am not sure but what each one
is a differant political entity, I only hit every tenth or fifteenth page on
my first scan through up to about page 150 or so, but I didn't see any
duplicates.

Les C



-----Original Message-----
From: Richard Smith
Sent: Saturday, April 15, 2006 2:21 PM

I don't know who gave you the information about townships being named,
which may be true in the midwest, but having worked in surveying within
the Willamette Meridian for years I never heard of that practice here.
Richard C. Smith
E-mailto:slugs at gorge.net
Home page: Http://www.angelfire.com/wa/family/


Robyn Greenlund wrote:
(ALSO -- sorry to shout -- today I was told that every township (i.e.
06S1W
Willamette Meridian) had to
have a name. Sure enough, in South Dakota, they were named.  Outside of
precincts, which appear to cross
township boundaries, I have not seen labels for Oregon.)