Uintah Special Meridian Initial Point, Utah

The Uintah Valley Indian Reservation was established by President Abraham Lincoln in 1861, giving the natives of the area two million acres of a remote valley in northeastern Utah described by Brigham Young as “one vast contiguity of waste.” A federal survey was started at this location in 1875, in order to subdivide the land on the reservation. It is one of 37 federal survey points of origin covering the USA (outside of the 13 original colonies), known as Initial Points, selected over a span of 150 years, to anchor newly acquired federal land to the legal and cartographic grid. Monuments marking the Initial Point for the survey, at the eastern end of the reservation, were gone by the 1980s, and a road atop the east-west baseline was paved. In 2009, the Ute Tribal Council, local counties, the Utah Council of Land Surveyors, and the BLM collaborated in reestablishing the initial point. They constructed a commemorative historical monument next to the road, evocative of the 1875 marker, which was a six-foot tall pile of stones with a 10 inch marking stone protruding from its top. A three foot deep hole was dug in the asphalt to uncover the remaining Initial Point marker, a brass survey disc from 1953. The disc was left where it was, and a second one was installed above it on a new layer of concrete, which has been left accessible, a few inches below a manhole-like access cover.