That's good to know, Bernie. It's been a very long time since I worked with field notes. When I learned surveying, it hadn't changed from Georkg Washington's time, apart from sone of the hardware. Barely a dozen years later, everything was recording total stations feeding CADD systems directly, and field notes were becoming a lost art.
I'd be curious to know how much of the data included the actual route survey. Typically, there were at least two surveys: one to get the lay of the land and another to precisely establish the route. A comparison of these would be particularly interesting since I've noticed some significant inacuracies in the 1894 quads. It occurs to me that there might be an opportunity for the Museum here: perhaps it would be possible to recruit one of the civil engineering programs to assist in getting all this plotted. They would benefit in giving the students an opportunity to learn something that, while they may never do it themselves, they will certain.y have to work with for generations until all the old surveys are digitised or superseded. The Museum would benefit in filling a large, significant gap in the history of the two-footers, and the preservationists would benefit in terms of recovering more Maine history that had been previously lost. Personally, I'd reall lkie to see how close I've come to hwat they had in mind, at least to the extent that's possible.
In the meantime, here's what I have come up withj, subject to being more accurately measured. These images contain the route that appears to make the best fit, at least so far, with whe general shape of Wellman's route. The narrower line is the pproximate center line of his map, which is not as neat as the original that inspired this whole effort, this being due to the coars scale of the original bein stretched over a much wider area consisting of a spherical projection. It's fraught with inaccuracies, but these tend to be minimal the closer I am to the axis of the end points I used.
The route here is my fifth iteration, and comes down to three significant grades, the steepest being about two miles at about 1.2% south of New Sharon, funning up the west side of York Hill. Hampshire his is the other side of the summit, at about 4.2 miles of 0.73%, followed by Foss Hill, about 3.6 miles at about 0.5%. In general, this would appear to be a very credible prospect, given the state of theart and the state of the budget thay had to work with.
These images work better in color, and I will post them as soon as I can get an image host arranged.
