Land Surveying in Lindale, GA

Land Surveying in Lindale, Georgia

Lindale is a census designated place, not a city. The Census Bureau draws a boundary around it for counting purposes and that boundary follows local and state roads, with Booze Mountain Road along the south side and State Route 101 marking the easternmost edge. Rome's city limits form the northern edge. Inside that outline the 2020 Census counted 4,283 people, 1,685 households and 1,877 housing units across 5.48 square miles of land. That works out to about 343 housing units per square mile, roughly double the density of Shannon and more than twice that of Cave Spring, and it is the reason so much of the survey work here is lot work rather than acreage work.

The lot pattern has a specific cause. Massachusetts Mills opened a textile mill here in 1896, Pepperell Manufacturing Company bought it in 1926 and gave the community and its schools the Pepperell name, and the mill ran until it closed on September 24, 2001. The Old Brick Mill was added to the National Register of Historic Places on September 9, 1993. Mill village housing was platted in blocks and sold off in pieces over decades, so a Lindale deed can call for lines set by a company survey, later split, and later fenced somewhere else again. Retracement here is mostly a records problem followed by a search for what is still in the ground.

Rome is the county seat and it starts at the north line of the CDP, so the recording office is close: the Clerk of Superior Court's Deed Room at Suite 103, 3 Government Plaza, roughly five miles north of the middle of Lindale. Assessment records are held separately by the Floyd County Board of Assessors and published at qpublic.net/ga/floyd/, where a Lindale street address will return the Floyd County parcel number, the acreage on file and the current appraisal.

There is no city government here to ask, so a division of land answers to the county. The Unified Land Development Code of Floyd County and the City of Rome draws its bright line at four lots. A minor subdivision, meaning a division into four or fewer lots each already served by existing public streets, water and sanitary sewerage, gets administrative approval of the final plat from the Planning Director, and that approval alone authorizes recording with the Clerk of Superior Court. Anything larger goes to the Rome-Floyd County Planning Commission. The same code also states that a properly approved plat must be filed and recorded on any division of property into two or more lots, and that writing a metes and bounds description into the transfer document does not exempt the transaction. Carving a single lot off a Lindale parcel for a family member is still a platted division.

The flood maps here are newer than almost anywhere else in the county. Of the 96 effective FEMA panels in Floyd County, only ten were reissued on June 7, 2019, and the rest still date to September 25, 2009. Silver Creek, Booze Creek and Prentis Branch all carry detailed studies through the community, and the mapping includes Zone AE with a regulatory floodway and areas of approximate Zone A. Booze Creek reaches its mouth essentially at the middle of the CDP. If someone hands you an old flood determination on a Lindale parcel, it is worth checking which panel it was written against.

The ground itself is not flat. The middle of the CDP sits near 653 feet. Less than a mile southwest, Booze Mountain reaches about 1,026 feet, and Saddle Mountain stands near 942 feet a mile and a half to the north-northeast, both by USGS elevation data. Small lots on the skirts of those hills are where grading, drainage and setback questions tend to collide, and where a contour drawing usually settles the argument faster than an opinion does.

S&S Land Surveying operates from 549 West Ave in Cedartown. The licensed Georgia land surveyor responsible for the work is William "Bart" Sims, and his seal is what goes on the filed plat.