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Benchmark Patterns & Layouts

As Baile
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Greetings all. When I first discovered the Benchmark hunting that was available here, I was quite excited. A bit too excited and decided to download 500 of them at a time. Not that I was going to spend the next six months searching for them, but to notice them on my GPS when I drive to work (I drive 45 miles to work every day). I noticed right away the patterns they make on the GPS map and found it a bit odd at where they were placed. For instance I live in extreme northeast Ohio, out in the middle of Amish county. Where you think benchmarks would be (like in big towns or even in small cities) there are hardly any, but find a mess of them in the middle of nowhere. That is also odd that there can be one or two in a five mile radius, then suddenly a cluster of eight to ten can be within two miles of eachother. Is there a reason why they are placed in that way?


I am not sure if it is like that everywhere, but it certanly is around where I live. Benchmarks not only let you explore your neibourhood, travel into the past but it make you think. Crop circles? No, Benchmark circles. icon_biggrin.gif

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With the exception of markers that lie on township and section lines, most of which are in the west, markers are not typically placed in any kind of pattern. They are placed wherever they are needed for particular projects, such as the construction of highways, airports, railroads, levees, dams, pipelines, etc. They were also placed, in bygone days, where a need for them was anticipated, along rivers and valleys where civilization was expected to develop in the future. Thus, some of the oldest surviving markers lie in areas where, for some reason, development never occured. Clusters of markers in a small area were probably set by different agencies, at different times, for different purposes. In many cases, where development has flourished, only the newest marker will be found to have survived, and the others appearing on a map of the area, were in fact all set sequentially, each one replacing the previous one, which had been destroyed.

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