As a surveyor and builder, Terry Hoppes was more aware of the changes than most. But their cumulative effect hit home for him as he sat in front of the microfilm reader in the archives of the Clark County Historical Society.
As Hoppes pored over the notes done by crews who surveyed Buck and Beaver creeks in the 1930s for flood control work, he was traveling back in time.
Their survey maps include the kinds of things one would expect to find on a treasure map: a 30-inch sycamore, a far-off church spire and chisel marks in stone.
“Looks like they’re making a traverse through town,” said Hoppes, who has spent his career continuing with the surveying and construction work done by his late father, Ed, best known as the builder of Northridge.
Traverse is pronounced TRA-verse like the bay and city in Michigan.
A traverse line serves the same purpose as a township line, making it possible to measure and locate all pieces of land and buildings from a set point. The difference is, a traverse line is drawn in not for parceling out properties but as a baseline for making measurements to carry out a project or build something.
The line is established by linking so-called traverse points one to the other like an invisible pipeline twisting through town. The traverse points would be located at the joints that hold the pipes together.
To make it easier for engineers and construction crews to return to these points when it’s time to build, surveyors make maps that show the traverse points in relation to landmarks, which is where the treasure map connection comes in.
In one instance, they measured 10 feet from from a chisel mark they made on the south curve of a roadway. So that those following them would measure to the right spot, the surveyors put the chisel at a place where it lines up with a far off landmark, like a church spire, flagpole or smokestack. Only by following that angle could they find the spot.
Hoppes saw drawings of the spires of St. Raphael and St. Bernard churches; the cupola of the golf shelter in Snyder Park; and mention of places like the Champion Company Water Tower, the corner of a building foundation near a curve in a railroad track.
“That’s decent artwork,” Hoppes said of a small rendering of the St. Bernard spire.
“There’s the flag pole at the Ohio Masonic Home, complete with stars and stripes,” he added. “That’s cool.”
The plans for the flood control project also sighted off things like the capital O of the old Ohio Steel Co. sign, bringing back memories of bygone times and places.
Most often, he pointed out, the drawings included two ways for finding each traverse point.
If they hadn’t and a building burned down or a flag pole was removed, they’d have been unable to find their traverse point.
The plans also have occasional tangent lines coming off things like the city’s old standpipe, which stood where the water tower now stands off Main Street near Greenmount Avenue.
“It’s called a tangent because the angle must be taken off one edge or the other of any stack or tower to ensure the same side will be used to relocate the crucial traverse point,” Hoppes said.
Siting off the center of the object would be too inexact, too likely to produce an error. The side, being a precise point, is always a safer bet.
Eventually all the information taken from a survey is used to create a map, Hoppes explained.
“And then they use that map as the basis for their engineering drawings.”
Although Hoppes had seen all the changes unfold, he remains amazed at how much surveying has changed since he began his work in 1967.
The first big change came with the introduction of electronic transits. Its digital readout mean he didn’t have to use a magnifying glass to read the earlier transit’s tiny scale.
Then came the electronic measuring devices, which eliminated the need to use 100-foot steel tapes, measurements with which sometimes had to be adjusted depending on how cold it was and how much the tape contracted.
Even after those vast improvements, GPS technology represented “a quantum leap forward,” said Hoppes.
“The process of using the church spires and the water towers (to site off) has pretty much been rendered obsolete,” he said. So have the usefulness of the few places in town where the U.S. Geological Survey placed markers reporting the exact longitude and latitude as reference points for local use.
Now, “we just take a GPS receiver and set it out,” he said. “As long as you have a clear view of the sky … within minutes, a circling satellite gives a precise readout of the location.”
Also obsolete: drafting linen.
In a time before copy machines, “the drafting linen was mostly transparent so you could lay it over your topographic map and trace off the features you needed for your engineering drawings,” Hoppes said.
But just as he has an appreciation for benefits of the new technology, Hoppes, who at 63 is in the final years of his career, has special appreciation for what he saw from those plans from the 1930s.
“When I started, that was the way I did it.”
Then remembering the Heritage Center’s past, Hoppes said “these guys probably did some of their work out of this building,” erected as Springfield’s City Building.
Terry Hoppes was looking back to the way things once were done, taking the measure of how they’re done now and wondering about the future.
Like most of us, he’s lived his life along a kind of transit line technology cuts through time, changing our lives along the way.
About the Author