National Surveyors’ Week

Proclaimed nationally by then-President Ronald Reagan on February 13, 1984, National Surveyors Week is celebrated each year starting the third Sunday in March. The purpose of the week is to educate the public about the value of land surveying through classroom contact, media, and visible public service.

There are more than 43,000 land surveyors in the United States, who are skilled or familiar with several fields: geometry, trigonometry, regression analysis, physics, engineering, meteorology, programming languages, and the law. In fact, some of the nation’s founding fathers, including George Washington and Thomas Jefferson were land surveyors during colonial times.

Surveying has been a part of the advancement of civilization since the beginning of recorded history, as it is necessary to plan and build most earth-bound projects. The first examples in the history of land surveying date back to the ancient Egyptians during the building of the Great Pyramid at Giza in 2700 BC. Throughout our country’s history, surveyors have been credited with developing economic plans that effectively use resources and land to help the country prosper.

While the basics of surveying have stayed the same, the tools of surveying today are much more technical than they once were. Drones and lasers have replaced much of the telescope-on-a-tripod work. Remote sensing and satellite imagery continue to improve and become cheaper, allowing more commonplace use, and there is increasing use of three-dimensional (3D) scanning.