Land Surveying in Woodstock, GA

Land Surveying Services in Woodstock, Georgia

Woodstock is a city in Cherokee County, and that is the first fact that matters on a survey here, because the deed, the plat and the approving authority all follow the land rather than the post office. S&S Land Surveying works out of 549 West Ave in Cedartown, about 43 miles west of the city, and Bart is the licensed land surveyor on every Woodstock, GA job. There is no branch office in the city. What we bring is familiarity with how Cherokee County descriptions read and where a plat has to go before it can record.

Woodstock covers 12.6 square miles, 12.5 of it land, and the 2020 Census counted 35,065 residents. Density is the useful number: that is roughly 2,800 people per square mile of land. Dense means platted. Most work inside the city is retracement on recorded subdivision lots, which means recovering the original corners, sorting out a fence or drive that has drifted off the line it was built to, and staking additions, pools and accessory buildings inside tight setbacks. Open acreage retracement happens here, but it is the exception. The city sits in the Atlanta metropolitan area, with I-575 and State Route 92 carrying the through traffic. Woodstock was incorporated in 1897 around a stop on the Marietta and North Georgia Railroad, the line completed through here in 1879, so on the oldest parcels near the original core we pull the parent description rather than the current tax map.

Where Woodstock Plats and Deeds Are Filed

Deeds and plats for Woodstock land are recorded with the Cherokee County Clerk of Superior Court, whose office is at 90 North St., Suite G-170, Canton, GA 30114. The clerk also keeps an annex at 155 Towne Lake Pkwy in Woodstock. Recording is the last step, not the first. Woodstock's land development code provides that no plat of a subdivision of land within the city is recorded by the Cherokee County clerk unless the plat has received minor or major plat approval, or is an exempt subdivision. That approval comes from the city, through the Community Development Department's planning division, which reviews development against the city's own land use plans and codes. On unincorporated county land just outside the limits, the reviewing authority is Cherokee County Planning and Zoning at 1130 Bluffs Parkway in Canton instead. Two adjoining tracts can run through two different review paths.

Which side of that line a parcel falls on is not permanent. Woodstock and Cherokee County have adopted a growth boundary agreement under which the city generally limits its annexations to areas inside an agreed boundary and the county generally does not oppose annexations there, and the county's GIS maintains city boundaries from annexation information the cities report. A Woodstock mailing address is therefore not proof that a parcel sits inside the city limits, so we confirm current jurisdiction from the parcel record before a plat is drawn. Cherokee County publishes parcel and assessment data through its qpublic parcel search, and the county map viewer is at gis.cherokeecountyga.gov. Our Cherokee County page covers the 1832 sectional grid these descriptions come from.

The Little River and Noonday Creek both run through Woodstock, and U.S. Army Corps of Engineers property reaches inside the city limits. Sites along those corridors are where a topographic survey and an elevation certificate stop being optional. On unincorporated Cherokee County land the county land disturbance permit is triggered by clearing or grading an acre or more, and separately by any disturbance of soil within 200 feet of state waters, so the topography has to exist before the plan goes in.