Swift Land Consulting

03/07/2026

Check out our new website for more information about our team, our work, our services, and our history.

Our Services Our Story Our Team Contact Us Our Services Our Story Our Team Contact Us “Surveying is a real-world puzzle based on objects you actually have to find. Some of them have been there more than 100 years, some are more recent, but what we find makes a difference in people’s lives. It ma...

02/26/2025

Our office today—some lovely hills overlooking Crawfordsville under clear, blue, warming skies!

02/24/2025

Surveying changes the way you look at the world—even in Dublin!

It was fun to find the Irish equivalents of the survey markers we use in the field.

Jim was especially fascinated to find two markers two-tenths of a foot apart: "We had been talking about how surveys have about .2 feet of play in them. Two-tenths. And here we find in Dublin two survey markers that exact distance apart. Evidently they have the same play in their surveys."

So we spent more time looking at the ground than most visiting Dublin. Doesn't mean we didn't spend plenty of time looking up!

02/24/2025

About this time last year, the Swift Land Consulting team traveled to Ireland, site of the first-ever detailed land survey on a national scale anywhere in the world (that would be the Down Survey, 1656-1658).

The Ogham Stone in the large photo below pre-dates that survey by about 1,000 years. The stones marked important sites and, possibly, boundaries. Predecessors of today's survey monuments! They're called Ogham Stones because they're inscribed in Ogham, the earliest written form of the Irish language.

The team also took in the sites (that's the Long Room of Trinity College Library, established 1592, where the beautiful medieval manuscript The Book of Kells resides) and some great music. We heard, in their native land, some of the Irish songs Jim's band, Nuthatch, plays, too.

02/07/2025

Matt Hood's office for the day—staking out a job in Montgomery County.

02/05/2025

A land survey provides a precise legal definition of a property's boundaries—it’s essential we get it right. Not only the drawing, bearings and distances and deeds of our client and adjoiners, but the description, surveyor’s report, and the small details that, if they’re wrong, could cost you big later on.

That’s why each survey at Swift Land Consulting goes through many drafts and multiple proofreading sessions with several readers who make sure the numbers are right and the language is precise and clear without mistakes.

Here Matt Hood makes corrections on a recently proofread draft of a survey.

02/04/2025

Stone Hunter—In the early years of Indiana's settlement, the federal government sent land surveyors to mark out the state's counties. Surveyors laid out cornerstones in one-mile squares, called sections, and the section corners were established by the United States General Land Office between 1819 and 1821.

To this day, those corners form the base grid from which all properties in Indiana are legally measured.

Jim Swift knows those corners well—before founding Swift Land Consulting, he was in charge of section corner perpetuation for the Boone County Surveyor’s office. He hunted for and documented the stones' locations, then set permanent monuments to make certain those precise coordinates would never be lost.

Jim continues that work as an independent contractor in addition to performing boundary, ALTA and topographic surveys and site layout/design.

Here’s a stone Jim and the team found recently. Note the cardinal directions marked on its side.

The accompanying grid map includes the locations of the section corners the stones marked.

Stone hunting and the process of unearthing and marking section corners can be an adventure, but that’s for a future post. There's a whole unseen world beneath your feet!

08/09/2021

It may look like Jim's surveying along some wild river in the West, but this is Mansfield, Indiana, one of the most interesting and picturesque of our recent surveys. With its old roller mill and covered bridge over Big Raccoon Creek, Mansfield (first called New Dublin when it was established in the 1820s) is packed with visitors during the Parke County Covered Bridge Festival, but sparsely populated and visited the rest of the year, unless you count all the butterflies, hawks, and woodpeckers we saw during our two days surveying there. Even researching this one was fun, studying a fascinating mix of earlier surveys, the town's plat book, and the Indiana Department of Natural Resources site where the mill is located.

05/13/2021

Whether we’re surveying among the locust trees in the woods near Waveland, on the infrastructure of a subdivision near Whitestown, or setting a more permanent magnetic marker for the section corners that form the base grid from which all properties are measured, two days for Swift Land Consulting are never quite the same.