by Kate Shunney
There aren’t too many women who can say they have followed in the footsteps of George Washington.
While the first president is remembered by history as a great general and father of America, here in Morgan County he is also known as the young surveyor who marked the early path from Bath westward over Cacapon Mountain.
Cindy Born thinks about that earliest connection between this place and George Washington, and how her own career as a surveyor has taken her along the same trails, roads and paths centuries later.
Born has been working as a land surveyor for 38 years – most of it in Morgan County.
“I fell into it because I didn’t want to work in an office,” Born said during a recent interview. She had been managing a greenhouse in Berryville, Va. for 10 years when the opportunity to work for Berkeley Land Survey appeared.
“My good friend Tari Hampe knew Mike Crawford needed someone,” Born said.
Hampe and Born knew each other from the local live music scene, where both played and sang regularly.
Crawford owned the survey company and operated it with the help of Chuck Dawson, but they were getting busier and needed more hands.
“I had the brains to learn the learn the math and all the techniques,” Born said.
“It’s all mathematical, all angles and distance,” she said.
Land surveyors have an important role in keeping the integrity of land records, establishing property boundaries that are the basis of sales, taxes, appraisals and development plans.
When she began in the profession, her primary tools were not too different from what young Washington would have used.
“A compass and steel chain is what I started with,” Born said. “But it was a good way to learn the foundations of surveying.”
Measuring land in a mountainous region like Morgan County is rarely flat. Born said measuring on a slope requires knowing how to measure angles as well.
“We were drafting on paper with pencil and pens and a drafting arm to mark plats,” Born recalled about the early years of her career.
Today, she uses surveying technology that makes the job take far less time – computer programs to enter GPS coordinates and create a rendering of a land parcel, plus technology to help prepare surveying descriptions for deeds that are recorded in the courthouse and used for legal transactions.
Surveying is “all about angles and distance,” Born said. A surveyor starts at a known point and works their way outward with whatever information they have – old deed descriptions, historic measurements, objects in the landscape.
“Sometimes you don’t have a description – just something like the phrase ‘Bounded by Smith on the East’,” said Born.
“Our job is to follow in the footsteps of the original surveyor,” she said.
In the profession, there are hierarchies of references for surveyors to follow. Geological features – fixed land features – are the “gold standard” to follow, Born said. Then there are things like stakes in the ground, planted stones, rock ledges, certain trees.
“You’re kind of a detective. That’s part of what’s fun about being a surveyor. It’s like a treasure hunt,” Born said.
Some of the clues that historical surveyors used don’t exist any longer, making the task trickier.
“If a deed calls for a chestnut tree, you’re not going to find it,” she said.
While the work is mathematical, technical and legal in nature, Born said sometimes it boils down to a phrase Mike Crawford repeated often – “You have to have a place to start and a direction to go.”
Surveying is a very physical profession, and was even more so when she began in 1988.
“It’s a lot of hauling equipment up and down hills, through greenbriers, across uneven ground. There’s like six weeks in spring that’s pleasant and six weeks in fall that’s pleasant and the rest of the time you just get through it,” Born said of the challenges of outdoor work.
The payoff, at times, was seeing places in Morgan County and taking in views that other people rarely get to experience.
“You’d be at the top of a mountain and think, ‘I never would have seen this if I didn’t do this work’,” she said.
“There aren’t very many unsurveyed parcels left in Morgan County,” Born said.
As Born trained and worked in surveying, she couldn’t escape the reality that it’s a very male-dominated profession. That’s still the case.
“Every workshop I go to, there are 300 men and three women. But once we start talking about surveying, it doesn’t matter,” she said.
During the housing crash of 2008, Born found work out of the area, surveying in Indianapolis and later Pittsburgh. She returned to Berkeley Springs with new technology tools in hand, including GPS equipment.
Born bought Berkeley Land Surveys from Mike Crawford in 2016 and ran the business with part-time office help and field crews to assist her. About that time, she also stopped doing field work after receiving several injuries.
This month her business became a subsidiary of Frederick, Seibert & Associates Inc. of Hagerstown under the management of Shannon Stotler.
Born continues to work as a surveyor and consultant part-time.
She noted that West Virginia’s requirements to become a license professional surveyor have changed – now requiring a college degree. When she came up in the profession, licensing could be achieved with 10 years of experience and a professional test.
“Land surveyors are getting older and dying out,” she said.
Born knows how important her work has been. Sometimes her surveys have settled boundary disputes between neighbors, or let someone give a family member a plot of land, clarified a property description or created a deed for land that had not been surveyed before.
“Surveying is such a link between all of the things that make the economy go. I appreciate being part of it,” she said.
