Sen. Doriot has introduced SB 605 creating the Indiana-Michigan Boundary Commission. The members will be five professional surveyors, one of whom must be from one of the boundary counties of Elkhart, LaGrange, LaPorte, St. Joseph, or Steuben County. The commission is to oversee the resurvey and placement of new boundary monuments for the Indiana-Michigan border. In particular, the survey is required to install “relatively permanent monumentation at the mile post positions and other positions at or near lakes or large rivers as established by the original government survey of October 1827.” However, they aren’t allowed to replace lost monuments unless the State of Michigan participates in the project.
This one appealed to my sense of history. Also, for some reason, it brought to mind the Lou Riccetti character in Joel Rosenberg’s “Guardian of the Flame” series. The conceit of the series was that a bunch of college students who played something like Dungeons & Dragons got transported into the fantasy world. One of the students was a civil engineer who was excited because, in our world, all of the great projects (e.g. Hoover Dam, the Interstate System) had been done and now civil engineers were confined to small bore projects. I’d imagine this project would be kind of fun for a professional surveyor. Who gets to survey something like a state boundary now?
Well, way more surveyors probably want to do the Indian-Michigan border than say the Montana-Idaho border. Growing up there…that has to be a nightmare to find the old (if any) surviving datums.