Wilson-Ford Surveying & Engineering Ltd.

09/02/2026

Why should I learn math?
For the parents who need to re-affirm to their kids the importance of math, given the upcoming school year, an anecdote from yours truly. But first let me begin with a joke:
A surveyor walks into a bar, and orders a beer.
Bartender says, “Why do you care so much about math?” (hey, remember this is my story)
And that is the nub of today’s story. Math has an image problem. It is often cast as the boogie man lurking behind pop quizzes and the eternal question “when will I ever use this?” But take a stroll into my world of land surveying, and you will find that we use it as we walk about your property, fancy gps receiver in hand, squinting at the horizon like Jessica Fletcher solving the case of “Where exactly does my neighbour’s fence actually belong?”
Surveying is at its heart applied trigonometry, wearing a high-vis vest. Every property boundary, every elevation, every perfectly boring cul-de-sac was birthed by bearings, distances, and a healthy respect for Pythagoras. Without them, a surveyor is just a person standing in a field with an expensive piece of equipment with no understanding of their purpose, or trouble-shooting results.
Consider the simple triangle, one of our most comforting friends. Through a technique called triangulation, we can determine the exact location of a faraway point without ever having to trudge through the mud to touch it. Trigonometry lets us measure the height of a cliff, the width of a river, or the distance to a mountain peak, all within the relative comfort of dry land.
Don’t get me started on coordinate geometry, and Keplerian motion. Latitude, longitude, and elevations are not just numbers on our tablet screens, they are the difference in location between “your house” and your neighbour’s garage. Algebra sneaks in too, solving for unknowns like solar radiation, tidal attraction, ionospheric corrections, multipath error ….
And let’s not forget error propagation – the art of admitting we are a tiny bit wrong and calculating precisely how much. We use statistics and adjustment calculations to account for the fact our instruments may wobble, the earth curves and humans sometimes make blunders. Math doesn’t demand perfection, it simply insists on calculating precisely how imperfect we are, down to the millimeter. Ah, comfort.
So why learn math? Because somewhere out there a piece of land needs its boundaries defined, a bridge needs its supports measured, and the Township needs its streets to actually connect to each other instead of wandering off. Math is the quiet comfort behind every fence, road, and boundary location you have ever trusted without a second thought.
In brief, math is how we measure the world, one precise angle at a time. Now, back to the bar:
The surveyor responds: “without math, this beer is just a guess.”
At Wilson-Ford Surveying we don’t think about math as it is in everything we measure, adjust and draw.
So, when folks say why should I learn math, contact us as the world already has enough bartenders.


www.wilsonford.ca

08/26/2026

The 2026 International Plowing Match and Rural Expo (IPM) is taking place in Bruce County this year and Wilson-Ford Surveying is proud to be a sponsor! The connection between the IPM and land surveying centers on mathematical precision, spatial layout design, and historical land development. As we have covered in previous posts, surveyors carved out concession lines and lots, allowing the plowmen to clear and cultivate the newly defined space.
Just as a surveyor would map and plan out a town or subdivision, similar methods are used each year at the IPM to create a massive, temporary “Tented City” and RV park. The Tented City functions as a temporary town constructed in the middle of farmland. It features straight, parallel streets lined with hundreds of commercial and agricultural exhibitors. The locations for underground or temporary water lines, electrical grids, and safety access routes also need to be precisely mapped out.
While a land surveyor measures and marks legal boundaries with high precision, plowing competitors are similarly judged on the straightness, depth, and neatness of their furrows—sharing an appreciation for a well-drawn straight line across a rural landscape
A primary metric in plowing competitions is the straightness of the first furrows (the crown). Contestants must plow without bending, requiring a sharp eye for straight lines identical to a surveyor establishing a sightline. Today's competitors and modern farmers utilize GPS, RTK (Real-Time Kinematic) positioning, and GIS mapping technologies. These modern tools bridge the gap between traditional surveying science and automated tractor guidance.
Since the location of the IPM travels throughout Ontario each year, we don’t get the opportunity to attend without a long drive very often. Take advantage this year and make the short drive to Walkerton between September 22 and 26 and while you are there, take a moment to appreciate the work that goes into setting up the tented city and all of its infrastructure.

https://www.plowingmatch.org/ipm2026/
www.wilsonford.ca

08/19/2026

Who wants a “free” 20 hectare lot?
This week we are focusing on another colonization road – The Durham Road – so named because it crossed the older Owen Sound Road at the Village of Durham. Today, the portion of the Durham Road that travels through the town of Durham is known as County Road 4 (formerly Highway 4) and from Walkerton to Kincardine it is known as Highway 9.
The Durham Road was surveyed by the government between 1848 and 1849 as an east-west transit corridor route through the Queen’s Bush (our history lesson of last week) crossing Bruce and Grey Counties. The survey of the Durham Road, including the town plot of the Village of Durham, through Grey County was completed by Surveyor David Gibson aided by his sons as chain-bearers (remembering that one chain was 66 feet of steel tape). The Bruce County section was surveyed by Surveyor Allan Park Brough.
The road stretches approximately 110 kilometers starting near Flesherton on the eastern edge of Grey County to the shores of Lake Huron in Bruce County and was opened in sections between 1849 and 1851. The route navigates the difficult, rocky topography of the Saugeen River watershed and thick swampy wetlands which made early travel notoriously treacherous. The road was mapped specifically to bridge major waterways, most notably where it intersects the Saugeen River at Walkerton and Durham. The road was cut through uncleared wilderness and acted as a baseline dividing different municipal survey grids and historical township borders across the region.
The Durham Road historical plaque can be found at the entrance to the Durham Conservation Area on Grey Road 27 and reads as follows:
“When the Durham Road was surveyed in 1848-49, it crossed the earlier Owen Sound Road at the village of Durham and was given that name. Laid out from east to west through the "Queen's Bush" in the old Wellington District, it crosses Grey and Bruce Counties and is now followed from Kincardine to beyond Greenock by Highway 9 and from Walkerton to Priceville by Highway 4. The road was opened in sections between 1849-51. Allocation of free 20 ha lots along its course began in September, 1841, and was well advanced by 1851. Villages soon formed along the route which became a model for later colonization roads.”
At Wilson-Ford Surveying we travel and survey along the “Durham Road” from downtown Ceylon (look it up) through to Yonge Street in Downtown Walkerton without sufficient reverence for the poor chain-bearers helping out their dad in the 1840s. Stay tuned for more history . . .

www.wilsonford.ca

08/12/2026

WHAT IS THE QUEEN’S BUSH?
As a follow-up to last week’s post, while the travelled portion of the original road laid out by Mr. Rankin may have only been wide enough for a horse or a horse and wagon, many of you got it right - it would have been laid out as 66 feet wide, or in survey parlance 1 chain.
We’ve mentioned the Queen’s Bush in some of our posts and would like to now provide some history about it. The Queen’s Bush was a vast piece of land largely unsettled in the possession of the Crown being part of what is now Southwestern Ontario between Waterloo County and Lake Huron. It was set aside by the Crown for clergy reserves. According to the Constitution Act of 1791 one-seventh of all public lands in Upper and Lower Canada were to be set aside as clergy reserves to support a “Protestant Clergy” which term was narrowly defined for the Church of England. These lands were intended to fund and maintain a stable Protestant clergy foundation. We will cover more on this in a future post.
The land comprising the Queen’s Bush was acquired by Francis Bond Head on behalf of Upper Canada in 1836 as part of the Manitowaning Treaty with the Ojibway of Manitoulin Island and the Saugeen Peninsula (including Saugeen Beach). The area had an abundance of wildlife, was densely wooded and once cleared was well suited for agriculture. Starting around 1820, over 2,500 settlers squatted on the land clearing it and building communities before the lands were officially surveyed. Among those settlers were 1,500 free and formerly enslaved Black pioneers. The Queen’s Bush was extremely harsh and lonely, especially for settlers with little to no economic or social support. While many of the settlers had agricultural experience very few had lived in the wilderness or knew how to live off the land. In 1840 the colonial authorities ordered that the Queen’s Bush area be mapped and subdivided into lots and concessions using a grid system for commercial sale. These new survey maps largely ignored existing homesteads and cabins and despite having cleared and improved the land, the skyrocketing value and lack of cash left most of the settlers unable to afford the government’s prices thus they were forced out of their homes and off the land.
An Ontario Historical Plaque located on Road 45 near where the Conestogo River crosses the road reads to following description;
“In the early 19th century the vast unsettled area between Waterloo County and Lake Huron was known as the "Queen's Bush". More than 1,500 free and formerly enslaved Blacks pioneered scattered farms along the Peel and Wellesley Township border, with Glen Allan, Hawkesville and Wallenstein as important centres. Working together, these industrious and self-reliant settlers built churches, schools, and a strong and vibrant community life. American missionaries taught local Black children at the Mount Hope and Mount Pleasant schools. In the 1840s the government ordered the district surveyed and many of the settlers could not afford to purchase the land they had laboured so hard to clear. By 1850 migration out of the Queen's Bush had begun. Today African Canadians whose ancestors pioneered the Queen's Bush are represented in communities across Ontario.”
Today there are many uses of the “Queen’s Bush” in local street names and businesses.
At Wilson-Ford Surveying, we encounter this history when we both do our research seeking understanding of the rational for the layout of lots, concessions, colonisation roads and settlements, and in the field when we come across an overgrown cemetery in someone’s parcel e.g. Nenagh, Ontario or a fence line which seems to meander along an as-yet unknown logic. This history permeates almost all of our work, as we predominately work in rural, some would argue remote, areas all over the Queen’s Bush area and up through the Bruce Peninsula. Stay tuned for more history . . .

www.wilsonford.ca

08/05/2026

The Garafraxa Road, or what we now know as Highway 6, took its name from a township near Fergus where the survey work commenced. It was built to connect the Grey Bruce region to the rest of Upper Canada (now Ontario). It was one of the first roads in the area and the decision to create the route was made by the government in 1830 although, due to the Upper Canadian Rebellion, Surveyor Charles Rankin was not commissioned to blaze the trail until 1837. It was opened to encourage settlement of the Queen’s Bush (stay tuned for a later post), which took in part of the modern-day Wellington County and nearly all of Grey and Bruce Counties. This route was loosely based on an ancient indigenous trade route.
To start the process of blazing the trail, the surveyor would walk through the region looking for the best route. Once the best path was determined, the surveyor would notch trees along the route with his axe and these marks would guide the survey crew that would follow. Anyone that has travelled Highway 6 from Guelph to Owen Sound knows that it has a lot of twists and turns. The reason for this is that Charles Rankin wanted the road to follow the highest levels of ground to avoid swamps and low-lying areas to ease the difficulty in building the road while also making travelling the road less treacherous. The clearing of the land to build the road began in 1841 and it took several years to complete. Since the initial clearing of the road, some 180 years or so, surveyors and road crews have continued to straighten and widen the Garafraxa Road. The journey up the Garafraxa Road from Fergus to Sydenham (Owen Sound) in the 1850s would take a full week horse and wagon. The same trip now takes less than two hours.
Fun fact: EGR in a legal description means East of the Garafraxa Road while WGR is West of the Garafraxa Road. Interestingly some legal descriptions in the southerly section of the road refer to it as EOSR meaning East of the Owen Sound Road and WOSR meaning West of the Owen Sound Road.
How wide do you think the original road was as it was laid out by Mr. Rankin?

County of Grey

07/30/2026

Many of the main road systems in the areas surrounding us were established as colonization roads historically known with names such as The Toronto-Sydenham Road, the Garafraxa Road, the Durham Road and the Elora Road among others. We are going to focus on The Toronto-Sydenham Road for this post and will follow up with posts regarding the other colonization roads in future weeks.
The Toronto-Sydenham Road, which we now know as Highway 10, roughly follows a 19th century stagecoach route. It travelled north from Dundas Street in Cooksville (Mississauga) through Brampton, Orangeville and Shelburne to Sydenham (now Owen Sound). Surveyor Charles Rankin was ordered by the government in 1848 to survey what would become known as The Toronto-Sydenham Road to attract settlers. As you can imagine, the task of the surveyors in surveying these colonization roads was arduous and very dangerous. The early surveyors also faced challenges in accuracy due to primitive instruments and high pressure to complete the work quickly.
The junction of what is now Chatsworth marks a diversion of the two major routes in and out of the area being what we now know as now Highway 10 and Highway 6, which was originally the Garafraxa Road.

The Toronto-Sydenham Road Heritage Plaque can be found in Memorial Park in Chatsworth and reads as follows: “The northern terminus of this early "colonization road" was located near here at its junction with the "Garafraxa Road". In 1848 the government ordered Charles Rankin, P.L.S., to survey a road from Melancthon Township through the present counties of Grey and Dufferin which would attract settlers and provide a more direct connection between Sydenham (Owen Sound) and Toronto. Free grants of 20 ha lots were given to persons fulfilling the required settlement duties, and by 1851 some 400 families had taken up land. In 1852 almost 64 km of the road had been opened although portions were still impassable for wagons. Most of this old settlement road is still in use as Highway 10.”

04/01/2026

Spring appears to be here – finally! Melting snow causing standing water can still be an issue for our field crew but we are happy to see the snow melting. As the old saying goes “April showers bring May flowers” and weather can cause us delays at all times of the year. If you are looking for survey work this year whether a boundary markout for fence construction or other project around the house, new home construction, a severance or any survey work, contact our office as early as possible to get your project on our schedule. Have a question or need more information? Call us at 519-323-2451 or email [email protected].

03/17/2026

03/10/2026

Treaties, Promises (?), and the Courts

In our previous posts we traced the surveyors who mapped Bruce, Grey, Huron and Wellington Counties — men who walked the land with compasses and chains, cutting roads through dense forest. But before those first survey lines were drawn, this land was governed by a different legal framework entirely: treaties between the Crown and First Nations peoples. And unlike the survey monuments those early surveyors planted, many of those treaties are far from settled.

The Treaties That Shape This Land

The territory covered by our posts — Bruce, Grey, Huron and Wellington Counties — sits within lands governed by a series of historic treaties, most notably Treaty 45½ (1836) and Treaty 72 (1854). Treaty 45½ saw the Chippewas and Ottawas surrender vast tracts south of Owen Sound, with the Crown promising to protect the Saugeen Peninsula in perpetuity. Within two decades, that promise was broken, and Treaty 72 followed — an agreement the Saugeen Ojibway Nation (SON) has long argued was signed under pressure and on unfair terms.

Still in the Courts Today

These are not merely historical grievances. The SON’s treaty claim, launched in 1994, resulted in courts confirming that the Crown breached its 1836 promise. Compensation and remedy proceedings are ongoing. In 2025, SON launched a further $167.6 million lawsuit against Ontario relating to quarry operations and the Goderich salt mine — the largest in the world — operating on ancestral lands without fair compensation or meaningful consultation.
Further north, the 2024 Supreme Court of Canada decision in the Robinson Huron Treaty annuity case found the Crown in breach of treaty promises stretching back to 1875 — nearly 150 years of underpayment. A $10 billion settlement followed with 21 First Nations, though at least one nation’s claim remains unresolved. In northern Ontario, ten Treaty 9 First Nations are challenging who holds governance authority over roughly two-thirds of the province’s land mass, a case with profound implications for resource development.

Two Perspectives Worth Understanding

First Nations’ position is consistent: treaties are solemn, nation-to-nation agreements, not historical footnotes, and the Crown must honour what was promised. The Crown’s position has historically been that treaty rights exist within the framework of existing provincial and federal law. Courts have increasingly sided with a more expansive view — that treaties are living documents requiring meaningful, ongoing fulfilment.

For surveyors, this history is not abstract. The lot lines, road allowances and property corners we locate every day were established on lands subject to these treaties. Understanding the legal and cultural context of the land is part of understanding the land itself. To learn more about our survey services across Bruce, Grey, Huron and Wellington Counties, visit us at wilsonford.ca.

03/06/2026

Sunday, March 8 is International Women’s Day!
Women have made significant strides in the survey profession, yet they remain underrepresented, facing various challenges while contributing to the industry’s growth and diversity.
We at Wilson-Ford Surveying & Engineering are proud to employ women in both office and field staff positions.

“If you want something said, ask a man;
if you want something done, ask a woman.” ― Margaret Thatcher