Surveyor to give the lay of George Washington’s historical landscape
If the dress code had been a little less stringent, Don Teter might have ended up an attorney instead of a licensed surveyor.
He might also have never discovered his knack for historical portrayals, including that of Edward Corder, who was banished from London to the American colonies in 1722 after being arrested for theft. Corder would go on to help a young George Washington survey at least 11 tracts of land in Western Pennsylvania in the 1750s.
Teter will portray Corder at the annual Washington’s Trail Summit on April 18, which runs from 8:30 a.m.-4 p.m. at Butler Country Club and is open to the public. Advance registration is required.
After earning a degree in history and political science from Davis and Elkins College in the early 1970s, Teter had been considering law school.
“Then I learned you had to wear a tie in class,” the 72-year-old West Virginia native jokes on a call from his home in southern Randolph County, “and it made me stop and think, ‘Is that what you want to do with your life?’ ”
It wasn’t, but without a master’s degree, he couldn’t find a teaching job either. So after a short stint pouring beer at a bar, he took a job with a crew preparing surveys for construction crews on the soon-toopen Snowshoe Mountain ski resort on Cheat Mountain. And as they say, the rest is history.
Three years after taking what he thought would be a summer job, Teter started the challenging process of becoming a certified boundary surveyor. Licensed in 1982, he has been surveying mostly rural areas ever since.
An assistant professor of surveying and geodesy technology at Fairmont State University since 2018, he also has taught continuing education courses in surveying for the last two decades.
Some classes include the teaching of cursive writing, the flowing penmanship in which many older surveys are written. Some of the finest examples, he says, can be found in the land grant surveys George Washington conducted throughout his career.
Teter’s many interests also include his colorful historical portrayals of 18th-century characters such as Corder. He demonstrates how Washington would have practiced the art and science of surveying, often in dire conditions, in the 1700s with an open-sight compass and 66-foot Gunter’s chain.
Teter will discuss that and much more that he has learned at the Washington’s Trail Summit
First held by the Washington’s Trail 1753 nonprofit in 2017, the event aims to provide history buffs with a better understanding of what Washington experienced on his treks west across the Allegheny Mountains before the Revolutionary War, said Rodney Gasch, a past president of the Harmony Museum and member of the trail’s steering committee. Each year has a different theme.
Previous summits have focused on Native American life and perspectives in the 1750s; plants and their importance for healing and nutrition; and the frontier forts in Pennsylvania that Washington visited.
This year’s topics include: the role of Native women in tribal governance; the short but bloody battle in the Ohio Valley in 1774 known at Dunmore’s War; and Washington’s seven trips to Southwestern Pennsylvania between 1754 and 1794, when he led troops into Western Pennsylvania to quash the Whiskey Rebellion (he
only rode as far as Bedford).
The summit’s $65 admission includes a full day of presentations along with morning coffee, muffins and lunch. There also will be vendors, exhibitsand door prizes.
While he has always loved history, Teter didn’t start doing historical portrayals until about 15 years ago, following a trip to Mount Rushmore National Park in South Dakota. (Three of the presidents pictured were surveyors.)
Touring the Sculptor’s Studio there, he noticed a piece of lath board that had a plumb bob in front, It’s what surveyors used to hang from a transit over a fixed point to establish a vertical datum.
“Being a surveyor, I thought that’s a surveying story there,” Teter recalls. “So I did some research,” which eventually led to him wanting to tell those stories in a fun and educating way.
“It’s a teaching tool to convey information,” he says, “and with a young audience, it’s a way to find a connection to history.”
Just don’t call them impersonations, he adds, because that’s used for comedy. “Portrayals are for education.”
Teter says he first started developing Corder’s character in 2012, after receiving a phone call out of the blue from the Bureau of Land Management. The nation’s largest land manager was getting ready to celebrate its 200th anniversary at its headquarters in Washington, D.C., and wanted someone to tell the crowd a good story.
“They didn’t know what they wanted,” he recalls with a chuckle, just that the historical narrative had to be about 20 minutes long and that he’d have to “figure it out.”
The best portrayals are of real people, Teter says, and after a little research he found a good one — “measuring guy” Edward Corder, who was listed in Washington’s own hand as a chain carrier on almost a dozen of the future president’s earliest surveys in the Shenandoah Valley and Blue Ridge Mountainsduring the late 1740s.
Arrested four times for stealing cloth, a small quantity of thread and money from a store drawer, Corder ended up in the colonies after claiming he was so drunk he didn’t know what he was doing.
“They basically presented him with the choice of being hanged or being sent to the colonies,” Teter said, “So he started looking forward to that boat ride!”
While no one knows for certain how Washington and Corder might have hooked up, it is safe to say the Brit probably wouldn’t have been as educated as the man who operated the compass. But as part of the chain crowd, he would have been more familiar with the territory, says Teter.
Though Washington’s career as a professional surveyor ended at age 20 in 1752, Teter notes it would have been a very important and lucrative position in the colonial era, since you could not get a land grant in “metes and bounds” states like Pennsylvania, New York and Virginia without a survey. (Washington, who is thought to have studied the 1688 book “Geodesia” by John Love, is credited with 199 surveys between 1749 and 1752.)
Those who attend the summit on April 18 will learn the methodology of chaining with a reproduction two pole chain, and Teter also will discuss how surveyors would have determined the directionsback in the day.
While he generally takes questions as the character, Teter says he’ll also break out at the end as “the researcher.”
“This sounds corny to some people,” he says, “but I still feel like I’m contributing to society and my profession.” Retirement, he adds, “is not in my genetics.”