A retired surveyor's comment about section lines changed how I read old maps

I was at a county archives open house last month in Franklin, Tennessee, looking at an 1830s plat map. This older guy, retired from the state surveyor's office, saw me squinting and said, 'You're looking at the lines, not the holes.' He meant the small gaps and offsets where property corners didn't quite meet. Told me those gaps often show where an old creek bed or wagon track used to run, stuff that got plowed over later. I'd been so focused on the drawn boundaries I never thought about what wasn't there. Since then I've pulled three old maps from the 1840s and found two spots where a missing corner matched up with a dried-up drainage ditch on current aerial photos. Anyone else had luck reading the blank spaces or overlaps on historical maps instead of just the main lines?

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