Thomas Jefferson's Poplar Forest

Jefferson, who had a life-long passion for surveying, would have marveled at the Global Positioning System marker installed this summer about 50 yards northwest of his home.

Jefferson would have appreciated the high tech navigational system because it makes surveying easier and more accurate.

The marker would have had added significance for Jefferson. It is one of the special GPS markers placed along the trail of the Lewis and Clark expedition to commemorate the bicentennial of America’s first cross-continental exploration. A Lynchburg, VA, engineering firm, Hurt & Proffitt, requested that Poplar Forest receive one of the markers because President Jefferson had ordered the mission.

The GPS marker carries the same symbol that decorated the peace medals that Lewis and Clark gave to the Native American tribes they met. The medal shows two hands, one representing the American government, the other a Native American, clasped in friendship.

The markers are particularly appropriate for the bicentennial because one of the main goals of the mission was to create maps of the continent. Jefferson, the son of a surveyor and a surveyor himself, understood the need to map the journey in order to further trade.

Poplar Forest’s GPS marker was dedicated on July 4, a special day in the history of the expedition because the purchase of the Louisiana Territory was announced on July 4, 1803. Much of the expedition route took Lewis and Clark through the Territory.

Click image for larger version.

The marker was installed courtesy of Hurt & Proffitt. The firm’s Doyle Allen, chief executive officer, spoke at the ceremony about the mission’s mapmaking assignment and the roles the leaders Meriwether Lewis and William Clark played in fulfilling that assignment during the 1804-1806 expedition.

“Using his own instruments, Thomas Jefferson personally taught Lewis the basic principles of determining latitude by observing altitudes of the sun or a star with an octant,” Allen noted. Lewis was responsible for writing down coordinates needed for mapmaking.

Clark was the cartographer. Allen said, “As a young Army officer during the 1790s, Clark was responsible for constructing military fortifications, a job that required skill in drawing and reading maps.”

Today, Allen said, the effort to map the portion of the continent covered by the expedition would have taken several months, not two years, and the cost would be “astronomical. Realistically, we might utilize satellite photography and align the photos in a computer with Global Positioning System control points, such as the marker at Poplar Forest, create a virtual fly-over and show it to the President on a big screen along with a complete analysis of vegetation, water bodies, land-use, wildlife, etc. All within a matter of weeks,” Allen added.

In contrast, Jefferson received a congressional appropriation in 1803 of $2,500 for the expedition, which left St. Louis, Missouri, in the spring of 1804 and returned in 1806.