PLSS States — Which States Use the Township and Range System?

Congress passed the Land Ordinance of 1785 to create a systematic method for surveying and selling the vast western territories the young nation had acquired. The result was the Public Land Survey System — a rectangular grid anchored by principal meridians and baselines, dividing the land into 6-mile townships, 1-mile sections, and 160-acre quarter sections.

The original 13 colonies — Connecticut, Delaware, Georgia, Maine, Maryland, Massachusetts, New Hampshire, New Jersey, New York, North Carolina, Pennsylvania, Rhode Island, South Carolina, Vermont, Virginia, and West Virginia — already had decades of established land records written in metes and bounds. Switching systems was neither practical nor necessary; those states simply kept what they had.

Two other notable exceptions: Texas entered the Union having already surveyed its own land under its own system during its years as an independent republic, so it never ceded its public lands to the federal government. Hawaii, admitted in 1959, was never part of the federal public domain and retains its own land description conventions rooted in its pre-statehood history.