Land Surveying in Sharpsburg, GA

Land Surveying in Sharpsburg, Georgia

Sharpsburg covers just under a square mile in eastern Coweta County, with the town of Turin immediately to the southeast. Georgia Highway 16 crosses the southern part of town and runs ten miles west to Newnan, where the Coweta County Clerk of Superior Court records every deed and plat for Sharpsburg land at 72 Greenville Street. Georgia Highway 54 runs the other direction, five miles northeast to Peachtree City, which is across the line in Fayette County and records at a different courthouse. Assessment records for a Sharpsburg parcel are published on the Coweta County qPublic site rather than at the courthouse.

The town was incorporated by the Georgia General Assembly in 1871 and named for Judge Elias Sharp. Legislative authority rests with a Mayor and four Council Members acting under the Town Charter. The Zoning Ordinance adopted on October 2, 2006 as Ordinance Number 06-10 answers the plat question without ambiguity. It defines the Planning Commission as the body the Town Council may establish, and it states that where no Planning Commission has been established, the Town Council itself acts as the Planning Commission. Section 13.1-3 keeps the power to create one with the Council. Planning and zoning questions go through the Town Clerk at the Town Office on Main Street.

That ordinance is unusually specific about what a survey has to produce. It defines a lot of record as a lot shown or described on a plat or deed already in the records of the Office of the Clerk of the Superior Court of Coweta County before the ordinance was adopted or amended, which makes the courthouse index the test for whether a lot is legal at all. It counts land disturbing activity affecting more than a quarter acre, stated as 10,890 square feet, as development. And it refuses a permit unless the owner produces a recorded access agreement, easement or other document showing legal authority to reach the property. An easement survey is usually the quickest way to satisfy that last requirement.

Design rules in Sharpsburg cut against the way most of metro Atlanta was built. The zoning is written around traditional town and neighborhood development and says plainly that subdivisions will not be isolated, closed or predominated by cul-de-sacs, but will be connected and integrated with their neighbors through street systems and sidewalks. Layout work therefore has to plan stub streets and connections rather than a single gated entrance. The town also carries separate ordinances for site development, floodplain management, stream buffers, groundwater recharge area protection, open space conservation, soil erosion and sediment control, and post development stormwater. Each of those puts a line or a note on a topographic survey.

The 2020 census counted 327 people in Sharpsburg. Most of the work here is boundary retracement on parcels that have not been resurveyed in years, staking for new construction, topographic mapping ahead of a site plan, and plats prepared for the Town Council to act on. Bart Sims, the licensed Georgia land surveyor at S&S Land Surveying, signs and seals each drawing.