Seven Ranges

When Surveyor-General Thomas Hutchins drove a stake into the ground to mark a "e;point of beginning"e; for the 1785 establishment of Seven Ranges of townships on the west bank of the Ohio River, he had to have sensed that he was initiating something larger than a survey. After all, he was working for the newly formed United States, and the purpose of his work was to impose a grid of ideal squares ...