Land Surveying in Moreland, GA

Moreland, Georgia: Records, Review and Survey Work

Moreland was laid out as a circle. A train station went up in 1888, the community was renamed Moreland that September and incorporated that December, and the boundary was drawn one half mile out from the depot in every direction. The Census Bureau measures the town at 0.90 square miles of land. Wherever the modern line runs on the ground, the same question opens every job here. Is the parcel inside the town, or in unincorporated Coweta County? The answer decides who reviews a new lot.

Deeds and plats for Moreland land are recorded with the Coweta County Clerk of Superior Court at 72 Greenville Street in Newnan, seven miles north on US 29. Parcel and assessment data live somewhere else entirely, on the Coweta County qPublic site, where a Moreland tract carries a county parcel identifier of the sort the town quotes in its own rezoning notices. Those two sources answer different questions. Only the courthouse index is evidence of what a boundary is.

Inside the town limits the reviewing bodies are local and small. The Moreland Planning and Zoning Commission meets at the Town Hall on Main Street and makes recommendations on amendments to the Town of Moreland Zoning Ordinance, with the application and the commission's recommendation kept on file in the office of the Town Clerk. The Board of Aldermen is the governing authority that acts on those recommendations. Town Hall keeps short hours, Monday, Wednesday and Friday from nine in the morning until one in the afternoon, which is worth checking before you plan a trip to read a file. Cross the circle and the jurisdiction changes: Coweta County's zoning and development ordinance applies to the unincorporated area, and that review runs through Community Development at 22 East Broad Street in Newnan.

Land history in Moreland starts well before the town did. The community grew up around Mt. Zion Methodist Church, built in 1843 for farmers who had drawn their ground in the Georgia Land Lottery of 1827, and those original land lots are still the framework that Coweta County deed descriptions hang on. The settlement shifted south when the Atlanta and West Point Railroad reached it in 1852 and put a wood and water stop there called Puckett Station. The old knitting mill on Main Street, listed on the National Register in December 1985 as the W. A. Brannon Store and Moreland Knitting Mills, now holds the town offices and the Hometown Heritage Museum. Cotton carried the local economy in those early years, and fruit crops alongside it, until the boll weevil and then disease and weather took both.

A survey in Moreland usually begins in the deed chain rather than in the field. The 382 people counted here in 2020 live on lots that have changed hands for more than a century, and the controlling corners are often iron pins set by earlier surveyors or the remains of a fence line. We retrace those boundaries, stake building corners and setbacks for new construction, run topographic surveys ahead of grading, and prepare plats for the town's review. Bart Sims is the licensed Georgia land surveyor at S&S Land Surveying who signs and seals each one.