Land Surveying in Bremen, GA

Land Surveying Services in Bremen, Georgia

Bremen sits on the line between Haralson and Carroll counties. Most of the city is in Haralson, and a small portion of the city limits reaches into Carroll, so a Bremen mailing address does not tell you where a deed or a plat gets recorded. Anyone hiring a land surveyor in Bremen, GA should have that settled first, because the courthouse, the plat book and the approving authority all follow the land and not the post office.

S&S Land Surveying works from 549 West Ave in Cedartown, a little over twenty miles north of Bremen on US 27, the same highway that runs through Buchanan where the Haralson County records are kept. Bart is the licensed Georgia surveyor on every job. We cover the city itself and the unincorporated county around it, including Waco two and a half miles southwest along the old Georgia Pacific line, Buchanan to the north, and the communities at Draketown and Felton.

Bremen sits south of the old Cherokee line. That part of Haralson County was Creek territory until 1825, became Carroll County, and was cut into 202.5 acre lots for the 1827 land lottery, so a description here reads as district and land lot with no section number in it. Haralson County was created in 1856 out of Carroll and Polk, and the part that came from Polk sits on the 1832 Cherokee grid instead, which means deeds there may reference 160 acre lots and a section number. Which of the two grids a description belongs to is the first thing to settle in a retracement, because they do not share a point of beginning.

Downtown never came off that rural grid. The town was laid out in 1882 as a platted grid of lots bisected by the railroad, the lots went to public sale that October, and Bremen was incorporated the following September. Retracing a line in the older blocks starts with that town plat and the railroad right of way, not with a land lot corner out in a field. Two lines still cross here, the former Georgia Pacific running east to west and the Chattanooga, Rome and Columbus laid north to south about 1887, crossing the Georgia Pacific roughly three quarters of a mile northeast of the Bremen depot.

The city limits have moved more than once. Bremen was incorporated in 1883 with limits drawn as a rectangle measured out from the depot rather than as a metes and bounds perimeter, half a mile east and west of the depot and a quarter mile north and south of the track. Those limits were shifted and enlarged around the railroad crossing on December 15, 1892, then changed again on December 30, 1898 to a circle reaching about 700 yards in every direction from where Buchanan Street crossed the railroad, which shrank the incorporated area and left most of the old town outside it. Under the Georgia Plat Act, O.C.G.A. § 15-6-67, a subdivision plat cannot be recorded without approval from the planning commission or the governing authority, so a tract inside the limits goes to Bremen's Planning and Zoning Commission at city hall on Main Street, and a tract outside goes to the county.

Deeds and plats on the Haralson side record with the Clerk of Superior Court at 4485 GA Hwy 120 in Buchanan. The Carroll side records with the Clerk of Superior Court at 311 Newnan Street in Carrollton. Parcel and assessment records are published at qpublic.net/ga/haralson/ and qpublic.net/ga/carroll/, which are useful for research, though a tax parcel line is an assessment product and not a boundary determination.

Work here splits fairly cleanly. Inside the limits it is platted lots, infill on older blocks, and site plans and topographic mapping for permit review, with commercial parcels sitting where US 78 crosses the middle of town, US 27 runs down the west side, and I-20 clips the south end. Past the limits it is acreage: family land being divided, boundaries not retraced in a long time, and corners set before a fence or a house goes in. Bremen drains into the upper Tallapoosa River sub-basin, so stream buffers and floodplain questions come up on tracts near water.