Survey Layers by County
Patent survey lines and tracts as shapefiles.
What this is
The land grid: original patent survey lines and tracts, county by county. Texas is not on the Public Land Survey System, so this abstract and survey grid is the only way to place a legal description.
How it is laid out
The Railroad Commission publishes this as ArcView shapefile. ArcView shapefile — several files that must be kept together. We mirror the Commission's file exactly as they published it, byte for byte. We have not decoded this one into a table yet, so reading it needs the right tooling.
What we add
Locate an abstract and survey on a map, which is how Texas leases and permits describe position.
- Mirrored so the file is here when the Commission's own link is not.
- Documented — what it is, where it came from, and when we last fetched it.
Worth knowing before you use it
Every RRC map layer is published in the Geographic coordinate system in decimal degrees on the NAD27 datum — EPSG:4267. That is not what web mapping expects. Overlaying it on anything modern without reprojecting to WGS 84 puts Texas wells roughly 100 metres from where they belong.
Files are packaged county by county under RRC's …
The full page lists every trap in this dataset.