MS (ViU: Edgehill-Randolph Papers); survey notes only; in Gideon Fitz’s hand, with words and numbers in italics and braces in TJ’s hand. MS (CSmH); plat; undated; entirely in TJ’s hand; see Nichols, Architectural Drawings description begins Frederick Doveton Nichols, Thomas Jefferson’s Architectural Drawings, Compiled and with Commentary and a Check List, Charlottesville, 1978 description ends , No. 518.

As he did for his planned purchase of land from Richard Overton, four days previous to this, TJ used Gideon Fitz’s (FITCH’S) survey notes to inform the drawing of a plat for land he was in the process of buying from two of his neighbors, Benjamin Brown and Thomas Wells, Jr. (see Promissory Note to Thomas Wells, Jr., 6 Sep.; Deed for Purchase of Land from Benjamin Brown, 9 Sep.). Rather than completely copying and revising the notes, as he had done for the previous survey, TJ mainly added notations that substituted poles, his preferred unit of measurement, for Fitz’s use of chains and links. The measurements, beginning with “S. 60 W 18. po.,” conform to the flatter of the two lines on the plat that run from the top right, down to the left, where they intersect. The measurements continue for the line that descends rightward to the bottom of the plat, from “S 41 E 6. po.” to “S. 36½ E 26.48.” Fitz had apparently included in his survey notes, measurements that did not conform to TJ’s preferred line, and TJ subsumed these measurements under his own, which he denoted with braces. The note to the right of the plat reads: “In this plat the level line is platted truly from the corner on the North side of the road to the branch in the main hollow dividing the two mountains. from the same corner on the road, the magnetic lines run and marked as the boundaries of the purchase by T. Jefferson from Brown & Wells are truly platted as they were run & marked to the same main hollow, & thence up the hollow to the antient forked chesnut, corner to Monroe, Wells and Jefferson. the point in each plat marked (a) ought to have coincided, and consequently they shew the errors of the work.” Beside the asterisk, he wrote, “on the branch in the main hollow dividing the two mountains, and at a remarkable hollow in the opposite side of the bank.” TJ drew an additional plat of the property on which he described the other of the two parallel lines: “a line beginning at Overton’s Brown’s and Jefferson’s corner on the North side of the public road and running level to the valley between the two mountains dividing the lands of Wells and Jefferson” (MS in CSmH; undated; entirely in TJ’s hand; see Nichols, Architectural Drawings description begins Frederick Doveton Nichols, Thomas Jefferson’s Architectural Drawings, Compiled and with Commentary and a Check List, Charlottesville, 1978 description ends , No. 519).