Indiana Society of Professional Land Surveyors

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Hoosier Hills PLSS Government Notes Project

In 2018, the Hoosier Hills Chapter received a grant from the Indiana Professional Land Surveyors Foundation to digitize the federal set of the PLSS government notes and plats for all of the townships in and adjoining the six counties within our chapter. The chapter and all six of the county surveyors (Jennings, Monroe, Lawrence, Jackson, Brown, and Bartholomew) provided matching funds.

In Indiana, there are three to four sets of “original” PLSS notes and plats.

  • The field survey set, which was originally written by the field surveyor, is available at the Indiana State Archive for approximately 30% of the counties in Indiana.

  • The federal set, which was transcribed by the GLO, is available at the National Archives

  • The state set, which was transcribed by the GLO, is available at the Indiana State Archive

  • The county set, which was transcribed later from the state set by the state auditor, is available from each county surveyor.


The Hoosier Hills grant only applies to the federal set, which we have found is consistently more legible than the state set.

The records can be viewed or downloaded through this interactive map.

The combined files (named by township and range) are available for download from our Internet Archive page.

In addition to the federal notes and plats for the six Hoosier Hills counties, the interactive map and the Internet Archive page also contain the state and county versions for Monroe County and the state version for the counties adjacent to Monroe County, all of which were provided by the Monroe County Surveyor. If you would like to add your high-quality digital images of notes and/or plats that are not included (either a different version or an entirely new county), please contact Rachel Oser directly. It would be great to expand the offering to include other counties.