Old Property Line Marker

There are ancient trees that the native American Indian used to mark trails when this country was without roads and some few survive even to this day - I do not think this is one of the Indian Trail markers, but instead I do believe it is a property line marker used by early surveyors in this section of the country - said surveyors using the idea that was still part of the local lore when settlers moved into this region covered by dense forests back in the 1700s or so.  They were used as line markers and not as corner markers from what I have gathered.  This one is a few feet off the present day property line but I think this is not so much an error on the early surveyors part as they were quite proficient in surveying even then but rather from a later day error in selected surveyed base markers that were corrected nearby just a few odd years ago.  Farther confirmation of my guess is that there were several of these trees along the west and the south boundary of my property when I first moved here some 35 years ago.  Most are now gone as disease and decay as you see above have wrecked their host.

Back in the 1600s and 1700s, when Indians were traveling from the Atlantic to the Pacific, and from Canada to Mexico, there were trails all over the United States. They didn’t have GPS or a map, so to find their way from A to B and back home again, they had marker trees, or trail trees, or a signal tree or a yoke tree—they had all kinds of different names for them. These trees would be bent as saplings, when they were about ¾-inch in size, and tied down. They would be left that way for a year and lock into that position. They used them to mark trails, crossing points on streams, springs to find water and medicinal sites where they would get plants.

Read more at http://indiancountrytodaymedianetwork.com/2013/05/03/groups-quest-find-and-save-indian-trail-trees-149169