A hundred acres outside Fortville can look like one big blank space. No fence line splits it. No shed marks a corner. No neighbor’s driveway gives you a clue where your dirt ends and theirs begins. If you’re trying to buy or already own vacant land near Indianapolis, that blank space is exactly the problem. Before you call anyone with a tripod, a few public records can tell you more than you’d expect.
Why Vacant, Unfenced Acreage Makes “Find My Property Line” Harder Than It Sounds
A subdivision lot in Indianapolis is easy. You pull the recorded plat, match the lot number, and there’s your boundary, drawn to scale, filed at the county.
Rural acreage in Hendricks, Hancock, Boone, or Shelby County rarely works that way. Most of it was never platted into lots. The legal description in the deed is written in acres, chains, or feet and degrees, not a lot number on a map. There’s no fence to lean on, no neighboring house to measure from, and no obvious edge where “yours” stops.
That’s not a flaw in the land. It’s just how rural Indiana was carved up long before subdivisions existed. It means the answer to “where’s my line” sits in a handful of records, not in a quick look out the truck window.
Start at the County Recorder’s Office: What Your Deed’s Legal Description Actually Tells You
Every deed has a legal description near the bottom, usually a paragraph or two of directions and distances. This is the starting point, but not the finish line.
In rural Central Indiana, you’ll usually see one of two formats:
- Metes-and-bounds: a string of directions and distances, like “thence North 88 degrees East, 660 feet,” tracing the shape of the parcel point by point.
- Aliquot part descriptions: language like “the Northeast Quarter of the Southwest Quarter of Section 14,” which describes a fraction of a square-mile section instead of drawing a shape.
Pull your deed from the county recorder’s office (Marion County and most surrounding counties now have this searchable online). Read the description slowly. Note the starting point, called the “point of beginning,” and each turn from there.
Here’s the catch. A deed tells you what was intended to be conveyed. It does not tell you exactly where those lines sit on the ground today. Old descriptions can carry small errors, gaps, or wording that doesn’t match a neighbor’s deed. The deed is your reference, not your final answer.
County GIS/Parcel Viewer Maps: What They Show and Where They Fall Short
Once you have the legal description, the county’s online GIS parcel viewer is the next stop. Marion County, along with Hendricks, Hancock, Boone, and Shelby Counties, all offer free parcel mapping tools online. Type in an address or parcel number, and you’ll see an outline of the property over an aerial photo.
This is genuinely useful for a first look. You can get a rough sense of shape, size, and how the parcel sits next to the road or a creek.
But treat it as a sketch, not a survey. County GIS lines are built for tax assessment. They’re often drawn from old deed math, aerial photo tracing, or data entered decades ago. It’s common for a GIS line to sit five, ten, even twenty feet off the true legal line. No county assessor’s office will tell you a GIS map settles a boundary dispute, because it doesn’t. Indiana law only recognizes a licensed survey as evidence for where a line actually falls.
County Surveyor’s Corner Recordation Records: An Overlooked File Most Buyers Skip
Here’s a record almost nobody checks first, and it’s one of the most useful.
Under Indiana Code 36-2-12, every county surveyor is required to keep a corner record book. This book holds field notes and references for the original section corners across the county, along with any corners that private surveyors have re-established and filed over the years. Each entry describes the type of monument found (an iron pin, a stone, sometimes an old fence post used as a witness marker), plus distances and directions back to nearby fixed points.
If a corner near your land was ever checked and filed, this record shows it. That tells you whether a surveyor has already confirmed where a key point on your property sits, and how recently.
Call or visit the county surveyor’s office and ask for the corner records tied to your section, township, and range. It costs little or nothing to ask, and it can save real time once a survey crew shows up, since they’ll be tying into the same corners anyway.
Section, Township, and Range: Reading Rural Indiana’s Original Survey Grid
Almost all rural land in Central Indiana traces back to a grid laid out in the early 1800s under the federal Public Land Survey System. Land was divided into townships six miles square, each split into 36 sections of about 640 acres. Your legal description, especially if it’s an aliquot part description, is built on this grid.
That’s why a county surveyor asks for your section, township, and range number before pulling records. It’s also why any new boundary survey on your land starts by locating the nearest section corners first, then working inward to your specific lines. The grid is the anchor everything else measures from.
Knowing your section, township, and range doesn’t hand you exact coordinates. But it tells you and any surveyor exactly where to start looking, and that’s half the work.
