Go to Cascades Park in downtown Tallahassee, and you'll find a metal marker in the plaza behind the Adderley Amphitheater.

It marks the principal meridian and baseline for all land measurements in Florida.

This marker was originally established in 1824 at the southwest corner of the township that was given to the Marquis de Lafayette by the United States in gratitude for his financial support during the Revolutionary War.

If you own land in Florida, the legal description is based on that physical point.

They call it the point of beginning for the public land survey system in Florida.

The public land survey system is a way to measure land consisting of tracts called townships.

A township is usually six miles by six miles and is broken down into 36 individual sections, each usually a square mile.

So each township has 36 square sections, numbered boustrophedonically, and is labeled in relation to the North-South primary meridian and the east west primary baseline.

The marker in Cascades Park marks the initial point.

It's the intersection of the meridian and the baseline.

So there are markers that are that are less, you know, visible, if you will, that, that demark the entire public land survey system.

And that's what the surveyors rely on.

The points where boundary lines meet to form and intersection are called corners.

Townships aren't called by names on survey maps.

They're given alphanumeric designations.

Townships are labeled T and then numbered sequentially both north and south, then denoted by range sequentially east and west, all in relation to the initial point.

Marquis de Lafayette's township would be labeled T1NR1E translated that would be township one North, range one east, and it would have been 36 square miles and 23,040 acres.

There's a repository of these locations.

So these are documents that are stored and can be retrieved.

This is just a very basic explanation of the significance of the marker in Cascades Park.

Discover more about the history of our local community@wfsu.org.

Slash local routes.

for WFSU Public Media, this is Mike Plummer.