Land Surveying in Aragon, GA

Land Surveying in Aragon, Georgia

Aragon sits wholly inside Polk County. That is worth saying plainly, because it is not true of every community around it. Taylorsville straddles the Polk and Bartow county line. Aragon does not, so an Aragon tract has one county index, one courthouse and one set of local subdivision rules behind it.

Deeds and plats for Aragon property are recorded by the Polk County Clerk of Superior Court at Courthouse No. 1, 100 Prior Street, Suite 106, in Cedartown, about eleven miles west. Assessment records live somewhere else entirely. The Polk County Board of Assessors works from 144 West Avenue, also in Cedartown, and publishes the county parcel data at qpublic.net/ga/polk/. An owner who wants to see the county's version of their own lot, the parcel number, the acreage, the land lot and district, starts there. That record is the assessor's map rather than a survey, and it gets corrected by a survey instead of the other way around.

Land divisions inside the city limits never go to the county. Appendix B of the Aragon code governs every division of land within the City of Aragon, and it runs through city hall. A preliminary plat goes to the city clerk in eight copies, gets a technical review from city staff and a legal review from the city attorney, then goes to the City of Aragon Planning Commission for a hearing or a slot on its next regular monthly meeting. The final plat comes back in nine copies, and the planning commission approves or disapproves it inside a window of thirty to ninety days. Section 4.5 is blunt about skipping that step: the clerk of superior court shall not file of record a plat that lacks the required approval, and submitting one anyway is a misdemeanor.

The drafting standards are written down, which makes them easy to meet and easy to miss. A final plat is drawn at a scale of not less than one inch to one hundred feet, on sheets no larger than seventeen by twenty two inches. Distances carry to a hundredth of a foot, angles to the nearest minute. Monuments have to be located and described. Closure computations for the tract boundary follow the Georgia Plat Act, and land lot lines or a reference to the corners belong on the face of the drawing. The preliminary plat asks for contours at vertical intervals of no more than five feet from a field or aerial survey, the hundred year floodplain, the streams and low ground, and the deed record names of the adjoining owners.

Water crosses the town, so the flood questions here are real ones. Euharlee Creek runs through the Aragon city limits, and the USGS watershed boundary dataset puts most of the city in the Middle Euharlee Creek subwatershed. The creek carries on into Bartow County and joins the Etowah River at Euharlee. The city adopted FEMA's flood insurance study dated September 26, 2008 and its accompanying maps by reference, and the office of the city clerk is the public repository for them. In a mapped special flood hazard area the lowest floor has to sit at least one foot above the base flood elevation, which is precisely what an elevation certificate documents. Any subdivision over fifty lots or five acres, whichever comes first, has to supply base flood elevation data.

State Route 101, signed Rome Highway, is the only state route inside the city, and city hall sits on it at 2814 Rome Highway. The Rockmart to Cedartown leg beyond it is carried by US 278. The town took its name from local deposits of the mineral aragonite and was incorporated in 1914, and it grew around a textile mill that is closed now. Population was 1,249 at the 2010 census and 1,440 in 2020. Mill era parcels and long held family acreage at the edges of town are the kind of ground where a recorded description and a fence line stopped agreeing a long time ago.

S&S Land Surveying works out of 549 West Ave in Cedartown, and every survey is performed under William "Bart" Sims, the licensed Georgia land surveyor who signs and seals the plat. S&S is licensed in Georgia only.