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Louisiana Purchase: Lands
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The official land survey of the Louisiana Purchase began in October 1815, when two land surveyors, Prospect Robbins and Joseph Brown, set out on their journey from the Mississippi River. (Brown later became Surveyor General of Missouri for a brief period and surveyed the boundary between Arkansas and Missouri. Little is known about the surveyors except that they lived near Clayton, Missouri, outside present-day St. Louis.) Robbins began at the mouth of the Arkansas River and surveyed due north. Brown began several miles upstream at the mouth of the St.Francis River and proceeded due west. Brown’s survey line is called the baseline, and Robbins’s line is called the Fifth Principal Meridian because it was the fifth north-south line surveyed in the U.S.
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From that point, the survey of the Louisiana Purchase lands began, with the two imaginary lines extending as far as the land itself. (Base Line Road in Little Rock is so named because it follows the original base line laid down by Joseph Brown.)
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The survey of the Louisiana Purchase, ordered by President James Monroe, began shortly after the end of the War of 1812, in part as a means for the federal government to pay its veterans with land. The nation’s greatest asset was land west of the Mississippi River, and it was necessary to survey that land so that it might be apportioned fairly to veterans and sold to settlers and other investors who were already streaming into the trans-Mississippi West.
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