Boundary surveys, ALTA surveys, site plans and construction staking across Pickens County. Licensed Georgia surveyor serving Jasper, Nelson and Talking Rock.
Pickens County sits in the Blue Ridge mountains of north Georgia, with Jasper as its county seat. The county lies in the Blue Ridge province, and Mount Oglethorpe, at 3,288 feet, stands here as the southernmost peak of the Blue Ridge. The formation that matters most to a survey in Pickens County is marble: the Murphy Marble Belt, the Georgia Marble district, runs through Tate, Marble Hill and Nelson, and the Pickens County courthouse itself was built of Tate marble. Mountain ground like this is why a topographic survey and a site plan are worth the trouble here, and why it pays to have the contours before a design is finalized instead of after.
S&S Land Surveying LLC works from 549 West Ave in Cedartown, in Polk County, and takes work throughout Pickens County. The firm was founded at the end of 2021 by William "Bart" Sims, who has more than 40 years of surveying experience, and the work is performed by a licensed Georgia surveyor. We hold a 4.9 star rating across 50+ Google reviews. Jasper is the county seat, with Nelson and Talking Rock the other incorporated municipalities, and we cover the unincorporated county as well.
Georgia is a metes and bounds jurisdiction. The rectangular survey system the federal government ran across most of the country never took hold here, because the land was granted by the State of Georgia and not by the federal government, so no township and range grid lies under a Pickens County deed. The State instead recorded land by land district and land lot number, and those identifiers remain in the legal descriptions on the deeds and plats filed today. The retracement of an older boundary usually opens by tracing them back.
O.C.G.A. § 44-2-1 requires a deed to be recorded with the Clerk of Superior Court of the county containing the land. Since it is the property's location that settles which office keeps the record and not the owner's mailing address, a Pickens County parcel is filed in Pickens County no matter where the owner resides.
The recording of plats is governed by O.C.G.A. § 15-6-67, known as the Georgia Plat Act. The clerk accepts and records a plat that meets the standards of the State Board of Registration for Professional Engineers and Land Surveyors when it is drawn on a sheet no smaller than 8.5 by 11 inches and no larger than 24 by 36 inches. The Act provides as well that a subdivision plat may not be recorded without approval from the planning commission or the governing authority, so a division of land must satisfy local review before it comes to the clerk. Current parcel and assessment data for the county is published through the Pickens County parcel and assessment portal.
Pickens County lies in the Blue Ridge province, on the crystalline rock that forms the spine of the southern Appalachians. Mount Oglethorpe reaches 3,288 feet here and stands as the southernmost peak of the Blue Ridge, the point where the range ends in Georgia. The formation that matters most to survey work in the county is marble: the Murphy Marble Belt, long worked as the Georgia Marble district, runs through Tate and Marble Hill, and the Pickens County courthouse was raised from marble cut at Tate. Marble is metamorphosed crystalline rock rather than the porous limestone of the valleys, so Pickens does not carry the sinkholes and caves of the karst counties to the west.
Mountain ground puts different questions to a survey than flat land does. How steeply a lot falls, where bedrock breaks the surface and how far the elevation shifts from one boundary to another all feed into siting a building, laying out a drive and access, managing runoff and meeting what a lender or engineer needs on record before construction begins.
A topographic survey maps the contours and the shape of that surface, and a boundary survey establishes where the parcel lines fall across it. On steep and wooded mountain tracts the fieldwork simply asks for more care, and getting the elevations and the corners right at the start keeps a design from being drawn onto ground that cannot hold it.
Retracing deed and plat calls to locate and mark the lines and corners of a parcel.
Learn More →Title and lender grade surveys prepared to the ALTA/NSPS standards for commercial transactions.
Learn More →Elevation and contour mapping for design work, drainage review and permitting.
Learn More →Existing conditions and proposed improvements drawn for city and county permit submittals.
Learn More →Dividing a tract into new parcels, prepared for the local approval a plat filing requires.
Learn More →Setting building corners, offsets and control so the work gets built where the plan puts it.
Learn More →Select a city for local surveying information. We also cover the unincorporated parts of the county, along with the county seat at Jasper and the town of Talking Rock. Nelson straddles the Pickens and Cherokee line, so which office records a deed or plat there depends on where the parcel actually lies.
Pickens County borders Bartow, Cherokee, Dawson, Gilmer and Gordon counties, all in Georgia. The neighbors we cover with their own pages are below.
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