Watching fellow surveyors use rudimentary materials - a metal sighting tool on a small wooden table, metal stakes and "two-pole" surveying chain - was an exercise in humility for several dozen men and women gathered Thursday at Coolidge Park.
"It would be rough doing it that way today," said John Winter, a surveyor from Knoxville who is here this week for the 2010 Surveyors Rendezvous and Tennessee Association of Professional Surveyors fall board meeting.
Mindful of this week's 147th anniversary of the Battle of Chickamauga, competitive teams of surveyors - some in period garb - worked to re-create Civil War battle maps the old-fashioned way.
No computerized equipment, GPS or calculators were allowed, according to Bart Crattie, an officer of the Historical Surveyors.
It was Crattie who, several years ago, brought to light the 1818 and 1826 historical surveying mistakes that set the Tennessee-Georgia state line about one mile north of where Congress, in 1796, intended the line to be.
The mistake, he determined, occurred because the surveyors of the late 1700s and early 1800s were working with erroneous mathematical tables - the precursors of slide rules and calculators.
"We don't expect any controversies from this year's work," he said with a laugh.
Milton Denny, of Tuscaloosa, Ala., demonstrated the "plain tables," transits and alidades of yesteryear.
"People who did this kind of surveying work got real good at multiplying," Denny said.
The technology of surveying didn't really jump ahead until after World War II, and especially until 1984, when the computerized "total station" evolved. Now even the total station is being phased out by GPS - Global Positioning System, a satellite-based global navigation system, Denny said.
The old-fashioned equipment may be unfamiliar to younger surveyors, Denny said, "but they may go down to the courthouse and get a map out that relates to this (older) type of technology and they need to understand what kind of accuracy it was done under and the conditions."
Chickamauga and Chattanooga National Military Park historian Jim Ogden said quite a bit of mapping took place in the region just before the Civil War because of the Tennessee River and the local desire to make the river a greater economic artery. The armies added to that bank of mapping during the war.
"The armies would gather that (earlier) information and compile it and produce maps," Ogden said as he watched some of the demonstrations Thursday. "The Union Army maps are better, primarily because they had a better means by which to reproduce the map."
Denny called surveying "the one common denominator that built the whole country."
"The immigrants came in, and there was land available, and you could get it surveyed and broken up into cities and subdivisions and lots," he said. "That meant people could buy farms and homes."
Contact Pam Sohn at psohn@timesfreepress.com or 423-757-6346.