Texas General Land Office (GLO)

The Texas General Land Office (GLO) is the state agency responsible for administering Texas public lands, managing state mineral resources, and maintaining the official records that underpin every Texas Survey System legal description. It is the oldest state agency in Texas — established in 1836 by the Republic of Texas, before statehood — and it is the source of truth for Texas land records.

When you resolve a Texas abstract, block, or survey reference, you are ultimately matching against a GLO record.

What GLO Does

GLO has three broad responsibilities:

1. Land records archive — Survey plats, field notes, patent files, and abstract maps for every original Texas land grant.
2. Public land management — Texas still owns several million acres of public land (state parks, state mineral acreage, state-water tidelands), and GLO manages it.
3. Energy and mineral leasing — State oil and gas leases, renewable energy site leases, and mineral royalty management.

For TXSS work, the first function — the archive — is what matters most.

The GLO Archive

GLO maintains records that span almost 200 years:

• Original survey plats — Hand-drawn maps from the 1830s onward, showing the boundaries of each original land grant
• Field notes — The surveyor's metes-and-bounds description of each grant, recording bearings, distances in varas, and natural features
• Patent files — The original land grant documents issued by Spanish, Mexican, Republic, and State authorities
• County abstract maps — Modern compilations showing all abstracts within each Texas county
• Bay tract records — State-owned tidelands and coastal lease polygons

Most of these records have been digitized and are searchable through GLO's online land grant database at glo.texas.gov.

Why GLO Records Matter for Modern Work

Every Texas legal description traces back to a GLO record:

• A title chain on a deed leads back to an original GLO patent
• An RRC drilling permit references a survey polygon defined by GLO field notes
• A pipeline right-of-way uses GLO survey boundaries as its anchor
• A modern Texas county appraisal district's abstract map is built from GLO data

When professional landmen, title agents, and surveyors disagree about a Texas boundary, GLO records are the tiebreaker.

GLO vs. the Federal BLM

In PLSS states, the federal Bureau of Land Management (BLM) plays the role GLO plays in Texas — it maintains the original survey records, the General Land Office (GLO) records collection (which is the historical federal GLO, separate from Texas's GLO), and the public land administration. The naming overlap is a source of confusion:

• Federal GLO — the historical US General Land Office, now part of BLM. Maintains records for all 30 PLSS states.
• Texas GLO — the Texas state General Land Office. Maintains records for Texas only.

Texas GLO is older than the federal GLO's records for any individual state, because it predates federal involvement in Texas land. The two are entirely separate agencies despite the shared name.

Working With GLO Data

Township America's TXSS resolver runs against normalized GLO data covering all 254 Texas counties. When you convert an abstract or survey-name description, the response polygon comes from GLO records.

For research that goes beyond the polygon — original field notes, patent files, historical surveys — go directly to GLO at glo.texas.gov.