I’ve always seen these little stones around my neighborhood here in Framingham and in the back of my mind filed it as a curiosity, but I never really looked into it.

And when I set a goal to make a conscious effort to learn new things in 2025, this was actually one of the things I was thinking about - what exactly is it with these stones?

As I ran more and more the past few years, I noticed that not only were these stones around my immediate neighborhood, but they were on almost every corner and all around the city.

And then before they did the road construction I told you about a month ago or so, surveyors were out and I put two and two together and figured the stones were connected to the surveying tool.

So I asked my dad, who knows a thing about construction and surveying. (When I was little I remember going to construction sites with him and I seem to remember seeing him doing some of the surveying even though that wasn’t his actual job. That’s that tripod thing that measures distance or something? You’ve probably seen it.)

He told me, yes, some cities and towns have stones - those are how they measure property lines and official distances and such - each spot is recorded in a way that shows an exact distance from that spot.

It’s not always stones - my dad was telling me that in New York City instead of putting something in the ground sometimes the ‘stone’ is buried into the side of a building and measurements are done from there.

(Sorry if I’m messing up some of these details. I don’t claim to be an expert on anything I write about - I’m just trying to learn about them and it’s an ongoing process and some things are easier for me to relay my understanding in writing than others.)

Sometimes the stones are obvious, clear as day on the sidewalk, like the one at the top of this post. Sometimes people mow around them on their grass, if they’re a corner property. Some of them can be buried on someone’s property, as you can (barely) see above and to the right.

And sometimes they’re paired with a pin, which you can see here…I am not sure how that works, because as I was reading about these tools some places only use pins. Maybe if the stones become somewhat unreliable, or are at risk of becoming unreliable, they put a pin in the sidewalk as a backup in anticipation of it becoming the official mark?

It’s kind of fascinating to me, because this is far from an area I know anything about.

After I talked to my dad I had wanted to search for one of these ones in New York City that he talked about - that’s still on the list of things I need to do at some point when I’m in the city.

I’m sure you’re wondering, as I did this summer - If they’re tearing up the sidewalks, what happens to the stones?

Well, I was not surprised to see - but nevertheless it made me happy - that they were careful to keep the stones in place even as they were tearing up the concrete. That’s what you see here at the right.

This is why I made ‘Learning New Things’ a goal - I like getting answers about these things that are in my life that I otherwise wouldn’t question.

When it comes to surveyor’s stones, I still have a lot to learn…but I’m glad to know more than I did a few months ago.