Land Surveying in Silver Creek, GA

Land Surveying in Silver Creek, Georgia

The community took its name from the stream, and the stream took its name from silver mining in the area. A post office has operated here under the Silver Creek name since 1880. What the community does not have is a corporate boundary. USGS records it as a populated place in Floyd County, and State Route 101 carries the traffic through it, with U.S. 411 and U.S. 27 about two and a half miles west. With no city limits to appeal to, the extent of a Silver Creek property is whatever the deed and the plat say it is.

The creek is worth watching for a different reason. It rises about eight miles south of the community in Polk County and reaches its mouth about five miles north, in Rome. A tract at the upstream end of that run records in Polk County and a tract here records in Floyd, so a chain of title that follows the water can move between two courthouses. In Floyd County the office is the Clerk of Superior Court, Deed Room, Suite 103, 3 Government Plaza, roughly six miles north of the community. Assessment records live apart from the deed index, with the Floyd County Board of Assessors publishing parcel data at qpublic.net/ga/floyd/, searchable by owner name or by a Silver Creek address.

The flood maps along the creek corridor do not all come from the same year. Ninety-six FEMA panels are in effect countywide. Ten were revised on June 7, 2019, and the other 86 have not changed since September 25, 2009. Both Silver Creek and Booze Creek carry detailed studies, so the mapping includes Zone AE with a regulatory floodway drawn inside it plus a shaded 0.2 percent band. A floodway line is a regulatory limit rather than a visible feature, which is why it usually has to be located on the ground before a structure near the creek is designed or permitted.

Hills box the community in on three sides. Ground here reads about 691 feet on USGS elevation data, and three summits ring it: Booze Mountain near 1,026 feet a mile and a half west, Saddle Mountain near 942 feet two miles north, and Hickory Mountain near 1,072 feet under three miles to the south-southwest. Creek bottoms in the middle and slopes on the edges is the pattern, and it is the reason a set of contours is usually worth having before a site layout is finished rather than after.

Subdivision here answers to Article 6 of the Unified Land Development Code of Floyd County and the City of Rome, the code that governs land lying outside any municipal limit. Divisions of more than four lots go to the Rome-Floyd County Planning Commission, and its approval of the final plat is what authorizes recording with the Clerk of Superior Court. The Code is specific about what has to be in the ground before that approval. Concrete monuments with aluminum or brass marking are set at all corners of the exterior boundary of the subdivision, flush with finished grade or up to six inches above it. Existing permanent monuments that a registered land surveyor or the city or county engineer judges durable enough may be kept in place instead. Every other lot corner, angle point and point of curve is marked with an iron pipe or surveyor's marker at least 24 inches long, driven to stand between one and six inches above grade. All of it has to be approved by a registered land surveyor before the Planning Commission acts on the final plat.

That last requirement is the practical reason to have a surveyor involved early rather than at the end. Older tracts along the creek frequently still hold usable evidence, pipes and stones set by previous surveyors, and deciding what to honor and what to replace is part of the work rather than an afterthought at the filing counter.

S&S Land Surveying is based at 549 West Ave in Cedartown, in the same Polk County the creek rises in. Work is performed under the Georgia license held by William "Bart" Sims, whose seal goes on the plat. Estimates are free.