Boundary surveys, ALTA surveys, site plans and construction staking across Polk County. Licensed Georgia surveyor based in Cedartown.
Polk County is our home county. S&S Land Surveying LLC works out of an office at 549 West Ave in Cedartown, the county seat, so a Polk County job is a local job for us. 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.
The county covers 310.3 square miles and was created in 1851 from parts of Floyd and Paulding counties. It straddles the boundary between the Ridge and Valley province and the Piedmont, so the ground itself changes character as you move across the county. Cedartown and Rockmart anchor it, with Aragon, Taylorsville and Braswell rounding out the incorporated cities.
Polk is an Alabama line county, sharing a border with Cherokee County and Cleburne County in Alabama, and two of its cities cross county lines inside Georgia. Taylorsville straddles the Bartow and Polk line, and Braswell straddles the Paulding and Polk line. A mailing address does not decide which county a deed or plat is recorded in. That question is worth settling before a survey is ordered rather than after the plat is drawn.
Georgia is a metes and bounds state. It never came under the federal rectangular survey system, because land here was granted by the State of Georgia rather than the federal government, so there is no township and range grid to fall back on. The State instead distributed land through a series of lotteries. Polk County land came out of the 1832 Cherokee lottery, which cut the territory into 160 acre land lots and identified each one by section, district and land lot number. Those numbers did not go away when the lottery ended. They still appear in legal descriptions on deeds and plats recorded today, and reading them correctly is usually the first step in retracing an older boundary.
Because Polk County was created in 1851 from Floyd and Paulding, a chain of title that reaches back far enough can lead into records kept by those parent counties. Under O.C.G.A. § 44-2-1, deeds are recorded with the Clerk of Superior Court of the county where the land lies, which means the office holding the record is set by where the dirt is, not by where the owner gets mail. In Polk County that office is at 100 Prior St., Rm 106, Cedartown, GA 30125.
Plats fall under O.C.G.A. § 15-6-67, the Georgia Plat Act. The clerk files and records plats that meet the standards of the State Board of Registration for Professional Engineers and Land Surveyors, on a sheet no smaller than 8.5 by 11 inches and no larger than 24 by 36 inches. The Act also provides that a subdivision plat cannot be recorded without approval from the planning commission or the governing authority, which is why a parcel split has to clear local review before it can be filed. Current parcel and assessment data for the county is published at qpublic.net/ga/polk/.
Polk County straddles a geological boundary. Roughly the northern four fifths sits in the Ridge and Valley province, the belt of folded sedimentary rock that defines northwest Georgia, while the southern portion crosses into the Piedmont with its rolling crystalline uplands. Two quite different kinds of ground, inside one county, and the difference shows up in how a site behaves.
The Ridge and Valley part of the county is underlain by the same Paleozoic limestone that makes this corner of Georgia cave country. Georgia EPD records 448 of the state's 513 known caves in Bartow and the eight counties north and west of it. Because that limestone is hard and dense, water moves along joints rather than evenly through the rock, and the solution features that develop over time are not visible from the surface.
S&S is based in Cedartown, so Polk is the ground we know best. Where a tract sits relative to that provincial boundary affects grading, drainage and foundation design, and a topographic survey is how that gets documented. Subsurface conditions are a geotechnical question rather than a surveying one, and we will refer that work out rather than speculate.
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. Taylorsville and Braswell each sit on a county line, so the recording county may not match the mailing address.
Polk County borders Bartow, Floyd, Haralson and Paulding counties in Georgia. It also meets Cherokee County and Cleburne County across the Alabama state line.
Our office is on West Ave in Cedartown. Send us the parcel details and we will tell you what the job needs.
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