The Formation of Ontario Townships
Land surveyors have played an important role in the settlement and development of Ontario. In order to provide for the large immigration of emigrants from Great Britain and United Empire Loyalists from the United States, the Surveyor General and his deputies surveyed the province into townships which allowed for the orderly disposition of Crown land. In the early days, townships were surveyed only along major communication routes such as the St. Lawrence River, Lake Ontario and Lake Erie. As immigration increased and the demand for land grew, the government extended the township surveys westwards along Lake Ontario to the Niagara frontier and beyond.
Since the earliest days of recorded history, the delineation of property boundaries and the ownership of land has been of paramount importance in establishing and recording the economic base of Ontario. The township surveys were the first Plans of Subdivision in Ontario. As the country developed and as improved methods for land surveys were devised, Ontario's township survey system was revised, resulting in a varied and somewhat complex cadastral fabric base. The digital fabric is maintained and improved continually as Ontario continues to complete surveys for the disposition of Crown land.
Surveying: Then and Now
Compared with the instruments of today, the survey equipment used by early surveyors might be considered quite primitive. Surveyors today rarely have to use transits and steel ribbon measuring tapes, they seldom take star or solar observations, or trek hundreds of kilometres through rugged terrain, cutting survey lines through the bush all while lugging all the equipment and provisions. It is a testament to those early surveyors that the vast wilderness of Ontario was so accurately and quickly surveyed.
Great strides have been made in science since the 1700s, including improved methods for measuring the earth's surface. To perform their professional duties now, land surveyors rely on all the modern conveniences such as all terrain vehicles and helicopters to access remote locations and employ instruments such as total stations that measure and record horizontal and vertical angles as well as distances, robotic total stations and global positioning equipment to carry out surveys of greater accuracy and precision. However, given that the vast majority of land in Ontario, especially northern Ontario, has not been patented, surveyors today can still encounter many of the hardships and opportunities for adventure that their predecessors experienced when surveying the wilderness of Ontario.
