Plats
A Plat consists of a map, drawn to scale, showing the divisions of a piece of land. U.S. General Land Office surveyors drew township plats to show the distance and bearing between survey corners, and sometimes included topographic or vegetation information. City, town or village plats show subdivisions into blocks with streets and alleys. Further refinement often splits blocks into individual lots, usually for the purpose of selling the described lots; this has become known as subdivision. After the filing of a plat, legal descriptions can refer to block and lot-numbers rather than portions of sections.
In order for plats to become legally valid, a local governing body, such as a public works department, urban planning commission, or zoning board must normally review and approve them.
A Plat of Subdivision appears when a landowner or municipality divides land into smaller parcels. If a landowner owns an acre of land, for instance, and wants to divide it into three pieces, a surveyor would have to take precise measurements of the land and submit the survey to the governing body, which would then have to approve it.
Other names associated with Parcel Maps are: Land Maps, Tax Maps, Real Estate Maps, Landowner Maps, Lot and Block Survey System and Land Survey Maps. Parcel maps, unlike any other public real estate record, have no federal, state or municipal oversight with their development.
Ellington Plats
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Newton County Court House |
| Site | Purpose |
| Newton County Website | |
| Property Tax Payment | |
| Sheriff's Office | |
Where Do I Live?
| To locate your address, open the excel spreadsheet Ellington, select each of the subdivision, find your street name, then find your street number. |
Reading a Plat
Plats contain a number of informational elements:
- The property boundaries are indicated by bearing and distance.
- The bearing is in the format of degrees, minutes, seconds with compass point letters before and afterward to indicate the compass quadrant. For example N 38 00 00 E is 38 degrees into the northeast quadrant or 38 degrees east of north. Similarly S 22 00 00 W is 22 degrees west of south. Note that north here is true north, so magnetic orientation must be corrected for magnetic declination.
- The certification note provides information on the surveyor and is the location where recent US plats place the flood survey code in accordance with the National Flood Insurance Act of 1968.
- The north arrow is familiar to most map readers
- The title block and lot numbers provide information specific to a development or land use plan
- An easement is usually indicated by a dashed line, although it is also common to have to look them up in supplementary documents (such as a title report)
- Streets are usually indicated by a graphical outline of the right of way, and sometimes depicts the paved area.
History
The word "plat" in medieval English (and ever since) refers to a piece (or "plot") of land.
The creation of a plat map marks an important step in the process of incorporating a town or city according to United States law. Because the process of incorporation must occur at a courthouse, the incorporation papers for many American cities may be stored hundreds of miles away in another state.