If anyone can claim to know every square inch of Pine Plains and its surrounding communities, it is Wesley Chase. In his 25 years as a land surveyor, Chase has crisscrossed the area, wearing out countless pairs of boots. Along the way, he has uncovered secrets, some of which he is willing to talk about.
Surveyors measure a property’s topography —- its elevations, contours, and holes — and conduct boundary surveys. They are hired by individuals, governments, and companies that either want to build something or need to know their property’s boundaries.
For Chase, a day’s work might include studying half-burned historical documents to understand the legal history of a property, then going out into the field to shoot lasers and deploy GPS tracking to help him pinpoint the dimensions of a given parcel. He works within a 25-mile radius of Pine Plains.
“By nature, I’m a problem solver,” Chase said in a recent interview. “My work requires figuring out any number of historical and mathematical problems.”
He grew up following his father, Lynden, a surveyor who is now semi-retired, on local jobs. “I would follow him around when I was eight. It had something to do with free labor,” Chase said.
His interest in local history was kindled when, as a boy, he explored the old Dutch Shultz farm on Ryan Road. That’s where Shultz, the notorious New York mobster, ran his whiskey stills during Prohibition, until he was rubbed out in 1935 by the hit squad Murder, Inc. at the Palace Chop House in Newark.
“It was pretty weird to know that and play hide and seek with my friends in all those secret tunnels he had in that place,” Chase recalled. “There was also a swimming pool up on a hill. So if the police came investigating, they could say it was for the family to swim. But we found a half-concealed pipe that ran from the pool down to the distillery. So the pool is where they got the water they needed to operate the distillery. After that I was hooked.”
Chase’s career path was not a straight one. “I wanted to pave my own way,” he said. “So I lived in a few different places and worked a number of jobs, and then one day, I realized what a beautiful and unique place we have here.”
He came back to Pine Plains, got a degree from Dutchess Community College, and apprenticed with Spencer Robinson, a master in Euclidean geometry and mentor to virtually every surveyor in Northern Dutchess. “Spencer really was a math wizard,” said Chase. His father taught him everything else he needed to know. “My father was proud and happy when he found out I wanted to continue his work.”
Now Chase is the go-to surveyor for the Pine Plains government. “My advice to anyone buying property is, get it surveyed,” he said. “Avoid the headaches.”
Surveying has a rich history that testifies to its importance in creating the nation. “After the Revolution, George Washington ordered every town in the new republic to map its territory, down to every grist mill,” said Chase. “He wanted to know exactly what was in the country in case the British attacked again.” In a sense, Chase is still executing George Washington’s orders.
The area around Pine Plains was originally surveyed for the land grants of 1708 using a chain and link method: a chain 66 yards long that was divided into 100 equal links to measure distance. Though the method was abandoned in the 1950s, Chase knows how to use it. He is one of those people who is curious about everything.
“My love for surveying has a lot to do with local history, which I like,” he said, “and a lot to do with trigonometry and geometry, which I also like.”
Surveying, for Chase, is a great jigsaw puzzle. “You have to put the individual pieces of the puzzle together to create a map.”
He is usually hired when there are boundary issues between neighbors, or when land has not been surveyed. One problem is the sometimes cursory way land was divided when European colonists first settled the area. The monuments colonial surveyors used were often just piles of rock that are long gone. “In our area, farms had wood lots” — forest land that was kept as the source of firewood — “but now a lot of people don’t know where their woodlots are,” Chase said.
A favorite challenge for Chase: finding woodlots on the back of Stissing Mountain. “Found 20 so far.”
A good surveyor is also a detective, skilled at burrowing into old censuses and historical maps to untangle complicated webs of land ownership. “Somebody would leave their property to a daughter, but then she’d marry and change her name, and I’d have to figure out her new name,” Chase said. “That happens a lot.”
To sharpen his sleuthing skills, Chase took a course on archival research with the curator of the New York State Archives and uncovered treasures in some unlikely places. After the great Kingston fire that destroyed the state capital and many of its archives in 1777, Chase learned that many legal documents had not fully burned; they had subsequently been restored and digitized by the state. “These archives are a treasure trove of documents for our area,” said Chase, producing a reproduction of a charred map of the area. “I was able to find so many different maps of our area online.”
In the past 25 years, technology has transformed the profession. The breakthrough was GPS mapping to accurately triangulate a position. Chase bought his first GPS drone six years ago and taught himself auto-cad, the digital drafting software that helps him create finished maps for a client.
But in some zones, questions remain that even a laser and a satellite can’t solve.
If there is a Bermuda Triangle in the area, it lies along a section of the Roeliff Jansen Kill: Where exactly is the border between Dutchess and Columbia counties?
“They have been struggling with that one since the early 1800s,” said Chase, “and they still haven’t agreed on a boundary.”
Officially, said Chase, the boundary is supposed to be along the southernmost tributary of the killl, but which tributary the colonial surveyors had in mind remains unclear.
The house Chase shares with his wife and children is festooned floor to ceiling with curios he has picked up on his surveying expeditions. In one corner, there’s a 19th century railroad lantern; in another, a beautiful iron chain forged by a long dead local blacksmith, physical reminders of Pine Plains’ rich past.
Peter Klebnikov / The New Pine Plains Herald
Chase holds the land he measures in deep respect. “I like to pay attention to the plants and trees around me as I work,” he said. “I like to think about what is here and why it is here.”
Sometimes, Chase comes across abandoned family graveyards. “I had a good scare once,” he said. “I knew from old documents that there was an old graveyard somewhere on the property. So I was walking through the woods looking for it, and I stumbled on a whole bunch of bones protruding from the ground. My hair went up. That was not at all what I wanted to see. Thankfully they were not human bones. It was a fox den.”
Surveying can be lonely work, but so far Chase hasn’t succeeded in persuading his teenage children to work with him. So he hatched an alternate plan. “My dream was to train my donkey to walk alongside me and carry my tools up and down the hills,” he said. “But she turned out to be stubborn, so now she just stands around guarding the chickens.”