Land Surveying in Canton, GA

Land Surveying Services in Canton, Georgia

Canton is the county seat of Cherokee County, which makes it the one place in the county where the land records, the recording office and the county planning desk all sit within a few minutes of each other. S&S Land Surveying works out of 549 West Ave in Cedartown, about 47 miles west of the city, and Bart is the licensed land surveyor on every Canton, GA job. There is no branch office here. What we bring is a working familiarity with how Cherokee County descriptions are built and where they have to go.

Canton sits near the geographic center of the county and covers 19.0 square miles, 18.3 of it land, with 32,973 residents counted in the 2020 census. It lies just north of Holly Springs, southwest of Ball Ground and southeast of Waleska. Interstate 575 runs down the eastern side of the city, State Route 20 crosses east to west just south of the Etowah River, and State Route 140 passes near the center of town. Downtown Atlanta is about 40 miles south by way of I-575 and I-75, so Canton carries metro Atlanta development pressure along the interstate and older, less frequently retraced ground away from it. Two Canton jobs can look nothing alike: a platted lot in a recent subdivision, and a parent tract whose corners have not been set since the description was written.

Where Canton Plats and Deeds Are Filed

Deeds and plats covering land anywhere in Cherokee County are recorded with the Clerk of Superior Court, whose office is at 90 North St., Suite G-170, Canton, GA 30114. Recording is the last step rather than the first. Under O.C.G.A. § 15-6-67 a subdivision plat cannot be recorded until the planning commission or governing authority has approved it, and in Canton that approval comes from one of two desks. For a parcel inside the city limits it is the City of Canton Community Development Department, which handles current and long-range planning, land development, building construction and code compliance for the city. For a parcel on unincorporated county land it is Cherokee County Planning and Zoning at 1130 Bluffs Parkway. Settling that question before the plat is drawn is what keeps it from coming back.

A Canton mailing address is not proof that a parcel is inside the city. The limits here have grown by annexation, and the county's GIS maintains city boundaries from annexation information the cities report, so a boundary drawn on an older map may not be the boundary today. We confirm the recording and reviewing jurisdiction from the current parcel record before anything is submitted. Cherokee County publishes parcel and assessment data through its qpublic parcel search, and the county map viewer is at gis.cherokeecountyga.gov. Cherokee County is original 1832 land lottery ground, so a Canton description carries a section number in addition to a district and a land lot. Our Cherokee County page covers how that grid reads.

The Etowah River runs through Canton, with State Route 20 tracking just south of it, which puts a good deal of the city's ground within reach of a floodplain question. That is where a topographic survey or an elevation certificate does the real work. On unincorporated county land the land disturbance permit comes from Cherokee County, so on a river-adjacent site the topography needs to exist before the plan goes in rather than after.