A government lot is a parcel created by the original survey to describe a piece of a section that cannot be described as an aliquot part. Where a section is whole and regular, sixteen quarter-quarters of forty acres each will describe it completely. Where a section is cut by a lake, closes against another survey, or lies in the north or west tier of a township, some part of it will not divide evenly, and the surveyor covered that part with a numbered lot instead.
Lots are not a defect. They are the mechanism that allows a rigid rectangular system to describe an irregular world without abandoning its own rules. But they behave differently from aliquot parts in almost every respect that matters, and treating a lot as though it were a quarter-quarter is one of the reliable ways to get a PLSS boundary wrong.
What creates a lot
| Cause | Where the lots appear | Typical character |
|---|---|---|
| Meandered water body: navigable river, lake or tidewater | Any section the water touches | Irregular parcels between the aliquot lines and the meander line |
| Excess or deficiency in the township | North tier (sections 1 to 6) and west tier (6, 7, 18, 19, 30, 31) | Narrow strips of nearly 40 acres along the outer half-mile |
| Closure against another survey, a state line, or a prior grant | The sections abutting the governing boundary | Wedge-shaped remainders with one irregular side |
| Closure against a standard parallel from the south | The tier of sections immediately south of the parallel | Short-dimension parcels in the north half of the section |
| Land excluded from the original survey, later covered | Wherever the exclusion lay | Lots created by a supplemental plat or dependent resurvey |
Note that the second cause is entirely a product of the system's own design rather than of any physical obstacle. Because the interior of a township is laid out from the south and east with full 80-chain measurements, whatever is left over lands in the north and west half-miles. Those remainders are covered by lots even in a township with no water in it at all.
How lots are numbered
Lots are numbered consecutively within each section, independently of the numbering in any other section. Under the general rule, numbering begins with lot 1 in the most northeasterly lot of the section and progresses west, then drops south and continues, so that the highest numbers lie toward the south or southwest.
Section 6 in the northwest corner of a normal township is the classic case, because it is fractional on two sides at once. It commonly carries seven lots: lots 1 through 4 running west across the north tier, with lot 1 nearest the northeast, and lots 5, 6 and 7 running south down the west tier. A section fractional on only one side carries fewer, typically four along the affected tier.
How lot acreage is computed
The acreage of a lot was computed by the original surveyor from the dimensions actually returned in the field notes, and it appears on the plat, conventionally to the hundredth of an acre. For a lot bounded by three straight aliquot lines and one irregular side, the computation is usually a trapezoid: the two parallel sides are averaged and multiplied by the perpendicular distance between them.
Area (acres) = ((w₁ + w₂) ÷ 2) × L ÷ 10As a worked example, take a lot in the northwest of a section, bounded south by a quarter-quarter line and north by the township boundary. The field notes return the north side as 19.42 chains and the south side as 19.46 chains, with a north-south dimension of 20.00 chains. The mean width is 19.44 chains, the area is 19.44 × 20.00 = 388.80 square chains, and dividing by ten gives 38.88 acres. That figure, not 40, is what the plat shows and what the patent conveyed.
Lots against a meander line are computed differently, because their irregular side is a chain of courses rather than a single line. The surveyor computed those areas from the meander traverse, and modern practice reproduces the computation with coordinates and the coordinate area method. Either way the plat acreage is the acreage of record.
Why lots behave differently from aliquot parts
- A lot's acreage is a returned figure from the original survey, not a nominal figure derived from a rule. It is specific to that lot and appears on the plat.
- A lot has at least one boundary that is not determined by proportional subdivision. That boundary may be a meander line, a governing survey line, or a township exterior.
- You cannot describe a lot by aliquot terms. Half of lot 3 is a division of the lot, and its boundary depends on how the lot is bounded, not on the section's quarter lines.
- Two lots with the same number in different sections have nothing to do with each other. Lot numbering restarts in every section.
- Lots adjoining meandered water raise riparian questions that lots created by excess and deficiency do not. The lot line at the water is a meander line, not the boundary.
The last point deserves emphasis because it causes more litigation than all the others together. Where a lot fronts on a meandered water body, the lot as patented generally runs to the water, and the meander line was run to compute area, not to fix the boundary. The acreage of such a lot is therefore an estimate of what lay between the aliquot lines and the water at the date of survey, and it may bear little relation to what lies there now.
Working with lots in practice
When a description refers to a lot, three documents are essential: the official plat that created the lot, the original field notes that give the returned courses and distances, and any supplemental plat or dependent resurvey that has since modified the section. Together they tell you what the lot was intended to contain and where its corners were placed.
In the field, look for the corners the lot depends on. Lots created by excess and deficiency depend on the quarter-quarter corners along the outer half-mile, which the original survey may or may not have monumented. Lots along water depend on meander corners set where the survey line met the water, and those are often the only original evidence surviving on that side of the section.