Andersons of Colonial N. Carolina

I’m in the back seat of a 1957 Chevy… Mom is in the passenger seat… Dad is driving. I was born in 1951 so I figure this must be about ’58 or’59 (Dad was a used car kind of guy)… I must have been 8 or 9. I slide over with my arms on the seatback by my Dad’s right ear. Dad! how far is a mile?, I ask, peering down the two lane blacktop. He ponders the question (and how to explain it to an 8 year old). About as far as you can see, he answers. And so it came to be in my head. Needless to say, that is why old timers always say- “down the road a piece” or “down the road a bit“. Old Timers ain’t zackly stupid.

So I came up with a little visualization “tool”. I came up with ’50 acres’ just because it was the same as a patent I was researching that had no ‘measurements’ included to determine it’s actual size. So I had to guess. And I wanted to be somewhat accurate at a scale of 1 mile = 640 acres when I put it on a map… note that a football field is “about” an acre. (work with me here… the idea is to keep it simple).

So now you and I can wrap our heads around about where Henry Snaile had a grant of land in 1637… his near neighbor was Peter Hayes. Many, if not most, of these very early patents are described in these imprecise metes and bounds. My circumstance being that while I cannot be precise… I can be reasonably accurate. I want to “map” these unmappable patents to the point a reasonable person can visualize, in a fairly accurate manner, where these grants, you know, ‘actually’ were.

I keep in my mind, while dissecting these early patents, that the olde boyse “meant what they said, and said what they meant”… I merely listen to them as best I can.

Oh… here is Henry Snaile in 1637… and Moon’s Creeke… Moone was the other neighbor.