05/16/2026
Today's history lesson. As part of a Work Projects Administration (WPA) funded initiative (circa approximately 1939-1943), Webster County completed a program recovering and permanently monumenting sectionalized public land corners. This effort typically involved recovery of the buried stones marking these corners, and then lowering (burying the stone deeper), followed by placing a concrete monument with a stamped brass disk above the recovered stone. The challenge is that neither the stone nor the concrete monument contain iron, so finding the 1940s monuments cannot be done with a magnetic detector. Typically we establish distance ties to above ground objects such as fence corners in order to pull distances from these objects to know where to dig for these monuments, but what do you do when all the fence posts have been removed and you need to find six of these concrete monuments? Answer, call in Webster County Road Department to help recover, reestablish, and permanently locate these important land corners. With help from Webster County Road Department as well as an additional backhoe loader from our private landowner, we were able to recover all six monuments. As the monuments were 3' tall, it was pretty typical to find the top snapped off as they got hit by road graders or farm machinery. The bases though still remain in the original position. Where possible, we put four iron rods along each side of the base of the monument and used these rods to hold the broken off top of the monument back in place. Where the top of the monument was broken and not found, an additional iron rod was replaced above the base to assist with future recovery. We would like to extend a big thank you to Tom, Dan and Perry for their assistance (on two incredibly wind free warm days) finding these nearly 90-year-old monuments!
