Baseline and the Fortieth Parallel

Notice that you are sitting almost exactly on the fortieth parallel of north latitude, and that is no accident. The road here is called Baseline because it runs along the original survey line for this whole region. The fortieth parallel was chosen as the dividing line between the Kansas and Nebraska territories back in eighteen fifty-four, and surveyors used it as the baseline from which all the land grids were measured.

In eighteen fifty-nine deputy surveyors were hired to extend that line west to the Rocky Mountains, where the young settlement of Boulder City was taking shape. A stone marker here honors their work and every surveyor who helped lay the grid of the American West.