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From Stone Walls to Section Corners
By: Susan Ruschmeyer, PLS
Back in New York State in the 50’s and 60’s, a frequent family activity
in my childhood home was the viewing of our home movies on a
portable screen in our den. One of our all-time favorite viewings was the
one of me at about age seven, “helping” two local surveyors survey our tenacre
property in the rural mountains of the northern Adirondacks. The party
chief, Edwin Knox, was the father of my best friend Gracie, so he let me tag
along with them all day, asking questions and carrying what I could, which
I am sure was not as much fun for him as it was for me! Our summer camp,
aptly named “Cragsmere”, sat high on a rocky bluff at the lake’s shore, surrounded
by dense and steep eastern woodlands; much of the boundary was
marked by a long line of blazed trees which the surveyors axed their way
around as I watched with great fascination. We had no road or electricity,
accessing the property by boat or by foot, and our eastern boundary was a
good stretch of rocky shoreline, meandering in and out of some ”table” rock
outcrops and nice deep bays, where we safely moored our floating boathouse.
In the ensuing years, I would make many annual treks around the
property lines, on foot (and also by boat) bringing with me anyone who
wanted to go, re-painting the blazed trees and making sure the perimeter
path was unobstructed. Looking back, I guess that’s where my career began.
My serious interest in land surveying developed when I went to a technical
college to study forestry many years later. In the interim, I had been
through the typical elementary and high school education for a girl at that
time, which basically conformed to the standard educational mantra of that
day, i.e., “girls are good at language and home economics; boys are good at
math and science”. In other words, we (girls) were not encouraged to study
anything in school other than what our school counselors felt would make
us be good “home-makers”, and being a land surveyor did not fit that mold,
to say the least! It was not until I had graduated from high school, attended
a liberal arts college for one year, dropped out and worked at various jobs,
that I found something that really interested me: forestry. So I returned to
the Adirondacks to attend Paul Smith’s College of Arts and Sciences, aka
Paul Smith’s College of the Adirondacks.
At Paul Smith’s, surveying courses were a part of our forestry curriculum,
as was algebra and trigonometry, and I discovered two things: I loved
surveying and I was good at math! We tromped all over the vast Paul
Smith’s campus in the Adirondack Mountains on different timber cruising,
silviculture and surveying projects, using fairly primitive field equipment
such as stadia rods, chains and chaining pins, plane tables, abney levels, and
closing traverses using logarithms and slide rules. We had a 300-foot topographic
“tape” with a trailer, and were required to convert our slope distances
to horizontal as we went. I remember that the first survey traverse we
had to run went through two bogs (swamps) and dense woodlands (with lots
of biting insects). All of the crews had to run it again because no one was
able to close it to our required specifications of 1:5000! I was hooked. Paul
Smith’s was a great place to be. Even at that time, although definitely in the
minority, there were a fair number of female students in my program, and
our professors worked us just as hard as they did the boys.
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