"Pop" Ferree's Workbooks . January 30, 2020

Copyright © 2020                               John F. Oyler

January 30, 2020

“Pop” Ferree’s Workbooks

The Bridgeville Area Historical Society recently acquired a curious set of workbooks with no record of their donor nor any explanation of their origin. I was able to borrow the first one in the series and have enjoyed going through it.

The worksheets are 8” by 10 ½”, some typed, some filled with meticulous hand calculations, and some containing scaled plots of land surveys. Each book has a return address label on it, giving the name of Joseph A. Ferree and his address on Chestnut Street.

Book One is entitled “Bridgeville, 1786 – 1846. There are more than three hundred individual sheets in the book, most of which are blank on the back. I have gotten to page 400 and September,1821.

 The first entry in the book is a typed page with the heading “February 8, 1786, from Warrantee Atlas”. It then describes the property “Water Inclosure”, that was patented to Thomas Redman on that date. The rest of the page records the twenty line courses of its survey, “copied from the Atlas”. The property included 208 acres of land bounded (“inclosed”) by the large loop Chartiers Creek makes north of Bridgeville.

The next sheet is a carbon copy of the first, with penciled notes reporting that the property was subdivided on September 16, 1786, with 107 acres going to James Cristy and the balance to Daniel Herbert. The next six pages (three sheets front and back) are immaculate pencil calculations of the components of each course, followed by a scaled plot of the survey.

Then comes a similar treatment of Thomas Ramsey’s “Purity”, 102 acres south and west of Redman’s property, and Benjamin Rennoe’s  “Widow’s Portion”, 342 acres south and east of Redman’s (and east of Ramsey’s). These are followed by a chronological sequence of land transactions in the Bridgeville area.

It appears that someone (probably Mr. Ferree) took on the project of recording and plotting the history of property changes in this area, utilizing information from the Allegheny Recorder of Deeds Department and the Allegheny County Warrantee Atlas.

Joseph Ferree began teaching at Bridgeville High School in 1910 when it consisted of two grades and a total of nineteen students. He was still going strong in the early 1950s, a completely different environment. Our class referred to him as “Pop” Ferree and, as a sign of respect, “the Old Sage”.

We know he was a member of the “Historical Book Committee” for Bridgeville’s Golden Jubilee Celebration in 1951. The precision of the calculations and plotting in this work book certainly is representative of my memory of him; I am convinced it was his project.

In addition to his being my mathematics teacher in high school, our family had several other ties to the Ferrees. His son, Origen (better known as Gus), coached my brother’s Knee Pants League baseball team. When my mother volunteered at the Bridgeville Public Library, she became close friends with Gus’ wife, Ada.

I was particularly interested in the surveys recorded in the original warrants. In the early days surveys were a record of the landmarks which defined the boundaries of the property; the azimuths and distances were merely recorded to provide the approximate location of the next landmark (corner).

For example, the survey for Rennoe”s “Widow’s Portion” begins at a white oak tree that is a corner of Henry Evault’s adjacent property and proceeds North 68 degrees west, 98 perches to a “linn” on the bank of McLaughlin Run. “Linn” is a Scotch word for steep ravine or gully; our landmark was the point where a prominent gully intersected McLaughlin Run.

We were instructed to begin at the white oak and aim our compass 68 degrees west of north. A “perch”, also known as a pole or a rod, was sixteen and a half feet long. If we marched 98 perches (1,617 feet plus or minus eight feet three inches) in the proper direction we should find the desired “linn”.

The approximations of both angle and distance were acceptable as long as we could use them to locate the corners (landmarks). As a general check and to evaluate the error of these approximations, the surveyor would then calculate the true components of each course and add them to determine his “error of closure”.

For this survey Mr. Ferree calculated an error of closure of nearly eighteen perches (nearly three hundred feet). This seems like a lot until you realize that the survey consisted of twenty-five courses totaling nearly four miles.

By the time I was learning surveying, instrument precision had improved by an order of magnitude. We would read angles to the nearest fifteen seconds and distances to fractions of an inch. An acceptable error of closure in those days for a survey of this length would have been well under five feet.

We are fortunate that Pop Ferree took on this project and has provided us with so much relevant information. As I continue to investigate it, I will report on the earliest days of our community.