Organizing the Archives: The Land Districts of Texas
First-time visitors to the Archives of the Texas General Land Office in Austin are sometimes surprised to learn that the original land grant files are organized by what are referred to as “land districts” instead of by county. What are land districts, and what was the reason for their creation?
When Texas gained independence from Mexico in 1836, one of the first acts passed by Congress on December 22, 1836, created a General Land Office (GLO) “whose duty it shall be to superintend, execute and perform all acts and things touching or respecting the public lands of the republic of Texas.”[1] This law meant it would be the duty of the GLO to validate existing land titles issued by previous governments as well as administer and issue new titles, called patents, for new land grant programs that the Republic of Texas intended to pursue.
To best administer the land grant programs of the Republic, it was crucial to ensure that new surveys did not conflict with old ones. The Republic of Texas began with 23 original counties which were loosely based upon existing municipalities that had been established by Mexico.[2] The boundaries of these counties were extremely vague and ill-defined, however, and no detailed surveys or maps existed to delineate the lines between these original counties.[3] This lack of clarity on county boundaries soon became a problem both for surveyors and the GLO alike as conflicts arose constantly to ascertain in which county land claims were located. John P. Borden, the first Land Commissioner of the GLO, noted this problem in 1838 when he sent letters to various County Surveyors asking them to meet with surveyors of adjoining counties to survey detailed lines between their counties of jurisdiction.[4]
As outlined in the Texas Constitution (Article IV, Sec. 11), new counties could be created by Congress upon the “petition of one hundred free male inhabitants.”[5] As the population of the Republic grew, new counties were established, including six in 1837 alone.[6] The boundaries outlined in these Congressional Acts were vague and since these new counties were carved out from original counties whose boundaries were already hazy, it’s easy to imagine the level of chaos the clerks at the GLO and surveyors across Texas were experiencing. From 1838 to 1843, seven more new counties were created,[7] further exacerbating the problem. John P. Borden, in his 1839 report to Congress,[8] specifically highlights the problem with the county lines:
“Another very serious obstacle which prevents surveys from being returned to this office, is the continual conflict arising from the lines of the several counties not being permanently established, many of them being as yet undefined by Special Acts of Congress.”[9]
Borden resigned as Commissioner in December 1840, and the next Land Commissioner, Thomas William Ward, assumed office in January 1841. Like Borden, Ward points out in each of his reports to Congress the problems arising with the fluid county boundaries. He puts it best in his 1843 report:
“...lands have been located as being in a certain county and by the surveyor of the county adjoining have been entered as being in the county of which he was surveyor; thus the same land has been located in many instances in two different counties and the field notes of each certified by two different surveyors, to this office, as being a correct location.”[10]
In each of Ward’s annual reports, he accurately points out that the Constitution of the Republic (General Provisions, Sec. 10) called for the country to be sectionalized.[11] In his view, this meant the creation of a township and range system like that employed by the United States, and that the creation of counties did not meet this Constitutional mandate:
“It is very obvious that the creation of counties for the purposes of representation is not a compliance with the law directing the Republic to be sectionalized…In consequence of this state of incertitude in relation to county lines all claims laying on or near what are the probable boundaries of counties, are in litigation, and therefore, no patents can be or have been issued that lay near where the boundaries specified in the several statutes creating county boundaries are likely to run.”[12]
In Ward’s 1844 report to Congress he outlines a possible remedy:
“To effect this, provision should be made by Congress for a surveyor to establish, according to the directions of the Commissioner of the Genl. Land Office, the boundaries of the existing representative counties, which should remain unchanged until the land titles of this country are permanently settled.”[13]
It took another 18 months, after Texas’ annexation to the United States, for the Texas Legislature to finally act and implement Ward’s recommendation. On May 12, 1846, in the act creating the General Land Office of the state of Texas, the law establishes that the 36 counties in existence on February 15, 1846, would be declared “land districts of the State of Texas.”[14] These land districts would then elect a District Surveyor who would have jurisdiction within these land districts regardless if (and when) new counties within the district were created. Surveyors and GLO clerks alike would now be immune to the seemingly ever-shifting boundaries brought about when new counties were created, and thus clarity was brought to the whole land grant and patenting process.
To this day, hundreds of thousands of GLO land grant files are organized by land district, and the file numbers of these documents include a land district prefix as an essential part of the file number. It should be noted that the statute created 36 land districts, but the GLO filing system uses 38 land districts. The GLO includes Panola and Paschal as districts which were not counties on February 15, 1846.
Panola is included because Panola County was established by Congress on March 30, 1846, only six weeks before the passage of the law establishing the land districts.[15] Field notes returned to the GLO between March 30 and May 12, 1846, were thus filed as Panola files. When the law was passed six weeks later, nothing more was filed within this “district,” as the law specified that only counties established as of February 15, 1846, would be considered land districts. Only 13 land grant files can be found filed under the Panola land district at the GLO reflecting this very short timeframe.
The Paschal “land district” exists at the GLO because Paschal was a short-lived judicial county established by an act passed January 28, 1841. Judicial counties were declared unconstitutional in July 1842, but field notes received at the GLO between January 1841 and July 1842 were filed as Paschal files.[16] When the law creating the land districts was passed, it was simply decided to keep these existing files rather than create new ones and risk confusion to already-settled patents.
The establishment of land districts proved to be extremely beneficial to the GLO and everyone else involved in the land grant and patent process. No longer were surveys subject to vague county boundary lines and the numbers of conflicts were reduced drastically. After the establishment of land districts, the GLO proceeded to issue patents at a much faster pace than before, which benefited both the state and its citizens immensely.
For an interactive map showing how Texas’ county boundaries have changed over time, visit the Newberry Library’s Atlas of Historical County Boundaries.
[1] Hans Peter Mareus Neilsen Gammel, The Laws of Texas, 1822–1897 Volume 1 (Austin: The Gammel Book Company, 1898), 1276.
[2] Luke Gournay, Texas Boundaries (College Station: Texas A&M University Press, 1995), 29.
[3] Currently, the GLO has not received County Boundary Files for the following counties: Bailey, Brazos, Brown, Burleson, Caldwell, Camp, Cass, Collingsworth, Crockett, Culberson, Delta, Encinal, Grimes, Guadalupe, Hidalgo, Houston, Hudspeth, Madison, Nueces, Panola, Parmer, Red River, Robertson, Rusk, Schleicher, Shelby, Somervell, Stevens, Washington, and Winkler.
[4] Annual Report — Commissioner John P. Borden, 14 June 1838, Box 1, Folder 2, pp 6–10, Commissioner Reports, Archives and Records Program, Texas General Land Office, Austin, TX.
[5] Gammel, The Laws of Texas, 1822–1897 Volume 1, 1074.
[6] Gournay, Texas Boundaries, 35–39.
[7] Gournay, Texas Boundaries, 39–43.
[8] GLO Commissioner Reports have been scanned and are searchable in the online land grant database by typing Commissioner Report into the “Class” field.
[9] Annual Report — Commissioner John P. Borden, 23 October 1839, Box 1, Folder 3, p. 2, Commissioner Reports, Archives and Records Program, Texas General Land Office, Austin, TX.
[10] Annual Report — Commissioner Thomas W. Ward, 15 November 1843, Box 1, Folder 6, p. 11, Commissioner Reports, Archives and Records Program, Texas General Land Office, Austin, TX.
[11] Gammel, The Laws of Texas, 1822–1897 Volume 1, 1081.
[12] Annual Report — Commissioner Thomas W. Ward, 15 November 1843, Box 1, Folder 6, p. 11, Commissioner Reports, Archives and Records Program, Texas General Land Office, Austin, TX.
[13] Annual Report — Commissioner Thomas W. Ward, 2 October 1844, Box 1, Folder 7, p. 34, Commissioner Reports, Archives and Records Program, Texas General Land Office, Austin, TX.
[14] Hans Peter Mareus Neilsen Gammel, The Laws of Texas, 1822–1897 Volume 2 (Austin: The Gammel Book Company, 1898), 1540.
[15] Gammel, The Laws of Texas, 1822–1897 Volume 2, 1337.
[16] Seymour V. Conner, “Paschal County (Judicial),” Handbook of Texas Online, accessed May 17, 2019, https://tshaonline.org/handbook/online/articles/hcp52
