In 1730 the entire town was surveyed and mapped.

The 1730 Sunderland  map, in contrast to the 1715 map, depicts boundary lines in a more correct manner. It was based on work by a skilled land surveyor, Timothy Dwight of Northampton. Dwight’s survey is an important historical document as it mapped quite accurately a large part of Montague and all of the towns of Sunderland and Leverett.

Dwight’s survey  shows the actual outlines* and the size of ancient Sunderland in its largest size.. The angular shape here is the same as some modern town lines.  While the monuments shown, such as an oak tree and a pine tree , were not permanent, some of these lines exist on the ground today.

*The west line shown here is a surveyor’s “tie course”, a straight line between the northwest and southwest corners on the Connecticut River.  The actual boundary is the irregular line which follows the river.

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The south line extends from the Connecticut River at “the Mouth of Mohawk Brook” (Town of Hadley) and then runs westerly 1960 rods (over 6 miles) and is the present south boundary of  the towns of Sunderland and Leverett. This survey and map, which includes the “2-mile addition” to Sunderland, also established the Leverett-Shutesbury line on the ground, and the original eastern boundary line of Montague (now within the Town of Wendell).  The eastern boundary line is nine miles long.

This map may have come about because an accurate survey was needed before the limits of the 2-mile addition could be established on the ground. Its filing at the Massachusetts Archives suggests that the General Court may have asked for or even paid for the survey.

In addition to this map, Dwight made several other surveys of land in the Connecticut River valley in the early decades of the 1700s. He was the author of original surveys of the towns of Northfield and Deerfield, among many other works.  A few years before he made this map, Dwight was the first commander of Fort Dummer,  a military outpost upriver in present-day Vermont.  In addition to being known in history as a prolific surveyor and a soldier, Dwight was the grandfather of an early President of Yale College, also named Timothy Dwight.

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The map was drawn in 1730 according to Dwight’s title (above), but the copy at the Massachusetts Archives has  notes which appear to have been added a decade later.

These two paragraphs contain “oaths”, what we would call affidavits, by the men who did the 1730 surveying. The writing is hard to read but it appears to record sworn statements by Dwight and one of his assistants (“Chain men”) that they did the work accurately.

Signatory Eben Pomeroy, Justice of the Peace of Northampton, wrote the statements. Eben Burrill, who “examined and approved” the statements, may have been an official of the General Court in Boston.

It is not known why these 1740 annotations were made.