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27-476: While platting Knoxville with his son-in-law, Charles McClung , in 1791, White ordered at least one lot to be set aside for a church and cemetery. The cemetery spot may have been used as early as the 1780s for burials, and the cemetery contained several graves by 1799, but the earliest marker is Blount's, dated 1800. While the First Presbyterian congregation was active in the 1790s, the first church

54-696: A surveying mistake or a scrivener's error. Such plats can sometimes serve to relocate lot-lines or other features, but laws usually tightly restrict such use. A vacating plat functions to legally void a prior plat or portion of a plat. The rules normally allow such plats only when all the platted lots remain unsold and no construction of buildings or public improvements has taken place. Other names associated with parcel maps are: land maps, tax maps, real estate maps, landowner maps, lot and block survey system and land survey maps. Parcel maps, unlike any other public real estate record, have no federal, state or municipal oversight with their development. Plats contain

81-544: A central space that is semi-private. They may contain a mixture of uses, with commercial or retail functions on the ground floor. Perimeter blocks are a key component of many European cities and are an urban form that allows very high urban densities to be achieved without high-rise buildings. In North American English and Australian English , the word "block" is used as an informal unit of distance. For example, someone giving directions might say, "It's three blocks from here", meaning either literally three blocks distant (in

108-546: A greater or lesser variety of sizes and shapes of urban block. For example, many pre-industrial cores of cities in Europe, Asia, and the Middle East tend to have irregularly shaped street patterns and urban blocks, while cities based on grids have much more regular arrangements. By extension, the word "block" is an important informal unit of length equal to the distance between two streets of a street grid. In most cities of

135-518: A local governing body, such as a public works department, urban planning commission, zoning board, or another organ of the state must normally review and approve them. The creation of a plat map marks an important step in the process of incorporating a town or city according to United States law. Because the process of incorporation sometimes occurred at a courthouse , the incorporation papers for many American cities may be stored hundreds of miles away in another state . For example, to view

162-416: A number of informational elements: [REDACTED] The dictionary definition of plat at Wiktionary [REDACTED] Media related to Survey drawings at Wikimedia Commons City block A city block , residential block , urban block , or simply block is a central element of urban planning and urban design . In a city with a grid system, the block is the smallest group of buildings that

189-513: A series of cells or Superblocks, each containing a network of narrower streets.” Superblocks can also be retroactively superimposed on pre-existing grid plan by changing the traffic rules and streetscape of internal streets within the superblock, as in the case of Barcelona 's superilles ( Catalan for superblocks). Each superilla has nine city blocks, with speed limits on the internal roads slowed to 10–20 km/h (6.2–12.4 mph), through traffic disallowed, and through travel possible only on

216-416: A single parcel. In order to do this, the landowner will usually need to make a survey of the parcels and submit the survey to the governing body that would have to approve the consolidation. A plat of subdivision or plan of subdivision appears when a landowner or municipality divides land into smaller parcels. If a landowner owns an acre of land, for instance, and wants to divide it into three pieces,

243-482: A surveyor would have to take precise measurements of the land and submit the survey to the governing body, which would then have to approve it. A plat of subdivision also applies when a landowner/building owner divides a multi-family building into multiple units. This can apply for the intention of selling off the individual units as condominiums to individual owners. A correction plat or amending plat records minor corrections to an existing plat, such as correcting

270-539: A typical city block is 330 by 660 feet (100 m × 200 m), meaning that 16 east-west blocks or 8 north-south blocks measure one mile, which has been adopted by other US cities. In much of the United States and Canada, the addresses follow a block and lot number system , in which each block of a street is allotted 100 building numbers. The blocks in central Melbourne, Australia , are also 330 by 660 feet (100 m × 200 m), formed by splitting

297-479: A young teenager working after hours as a "printer's devil" for the Knoxville Chronicle , feared walking past the graveyard at night, as many locals believed it to be haunted. Rather than leave work after his shift (which ended close to midnight), Ochs stayed until daylight, spending the extra time learning the typesetting and printing trades. The present First Presbyterian Church, constructed in 1903,

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324-456: Is a Neoclassical building , with a Tiffany-style stained glass window. The First Presbyterian Church Graveyard resembles a traditional early Anglo-American cemetery, with graves crowded together and marked by relatively simple headstones. Most of the headstones are polished, upright stones, although a few (such as the Blounts') are flat stones. Most are adorned with simple inscriptions noting

351-460: Is surrounded by streets . City blocks are the space for buildings within the street pattern of a city, and form the basic unit of a city's urban fabric. City blocks may be subdivided into any number of smaller land lots usually in private ownership, though in some cases, it may be other forms of tenure. City blocks are usually built-up to varying degrees and thus form the physical containers or "streetwalls" of public space. Most cities are composed of

378-456: The New World that were planned rather than developing gradually over a long period of time, streets are typically laid out on a grid plan of square or rectangular city blocks. Using the perimeter block development principle, city blocks are developed so that buildings are located along the perimeter of the block, with entrances facing the street, and semi-private courtyards in the rear of

405-501: The buildings. This historic arrangement reflects organic development of structures and land usage, adapted to urban planning. Since the spacing of streets in grid plans varies so widely among cities, or even within cities, it is difficult to generalize about the size of a city block. Oblong blocks range considerably in width and length. The standard block in Manhattan is about 264 by 900 feet (80 m × 274 m). In Chicago ,

432-513: The deceased's name, date of death, and number of years lived. A low iron fence surrounds the graveyard's perimeter, and crude stone walkways allow access. Plat In the United States , a plat ( / p l æ t / or / p l ɑː t / ) ( plan ) is a cadastral map , drawn to scale, showing the divisions of a piece of land. United States General Land Office surveyors drafted township plats of Public Lands Surveys to show

459-525: The distance and bearing between section corners, sometimes including topographic or vegetation information. City, town or village plats show subdivisions broken into blocks with streets and alleys. Further refinement often splits blocks into individual lots , usually for the purpose of selling the described lots; this has become known as subdivision . After the filing of a plat, legal descriptions can refer to block and lot-numbers rather than portions of sections . In order for plats to become legally valid,

486-465: The example of Philadelphia , New York City adopted the Commissioners' Plan of 1811 for a more extensive grid plan . Some variations of the interpretation of city blocks include superblocks, subblocks, and perimeter blocks. A superblock , or super-block , is an area of urban land that is bounded by arterial roads and the size of multiple typically sized city blocks. Within the superblock,

513-461: The local road network, if any, is designed to serve only local needs. Superblocks can also contain an orthogonal internal road network, including those based on a grid plan or quasi-grid plan. That typology is prevalent in Japan and China, for example. Chen defines the supergrid and superblock urban morphology in that context as follows: “The Supergrid is a large-scale net of wide roads that defines

540-621: The original United States General Land Office plat for the city of San Francisco, California , filed in 1849, one must visit the Museum of the Oregon Territory in Oregon City, Oregon , as at that time Oregon City was the site of the closest federal land office to San Francisco. A plat of consolidation or plan of consolidation originates when a landowner takes over several adjacent parcels of land and consolidates them into

567-434: The perimeter roads. In a geoprocessing perspective there are two complementary ways of modeling city blocks: A block without sidewalks is always within a block with sidewalks . The geometric subtraction of a block without sidewalks from block with sidewalks , contains the sidewalk, the alley, and any other non-lot sub-structure. A perimeter block is a type of city block which is built up on all sides surrounding

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594-552: The square blocks in an original grid with a narrow street down the middle. Many Old World cities have grown by accretion over time rather than being planned, making rectangular city blocks uncommon in the innermost development among most European cities , for example. An exception is represented by those cities that were founded as Roman military settlements, and that often preserve the original grid layout around two main orthogonal axes (such as Turin, Italy ) and cities heavily damaged during World War II (like Frankfurt ). Following

621-601: The town 1863–1865) used the church as a hospital and barracks. Humorist George Washington Harris (1814–1869), an ardent Presbyterian, served as an elder of the First Presbyterian Church during his years in Knoxville. Two of his children, Harriet (1838–1846) and George (1841–1842), are buried in the graveyard. In the 1870s, the graveyard had an indirect effect on the career of future newspaper publisher, Adolph Ochs . Ochs, then

648-448: The town into 64 half-acre (0.2-ha) lots, and added additional lots in 1795, with the cemetery lot being included in the later additions. While the cemetery was not officially platted until 1795, historians speculate that burials likely occurred before that date. When Moravian missionary Frederick de Schweinitz passed through Knoxville in 1799, he reported that the cemetery already had numerous burials. The First Presbyterian congregation

675-474: The town. Approximately one-tenth of the marked graves in the graveyard are dated "1838"— more than any other single year— and one tombstone mentions "the fever." The graveyard was open to new burials until 1857, but the last burial took place in 1879. During the Civil War , Confederate soldiers (who occupied the town 1861–1863) kept horses in the cemetery, and Union soldiers (who occupied

702-544: Was not built on the site until 1816. The graveyard was used for burials for nearly sixty years, its most active period being during the Epidemic of 1838, in which hundreds of Knoxvillians died from an unidentified illness. In 1790, after his fort was chosen as the capital for the newly created Southwest Territory , James White asked his son-in-law, surveyor Charles McClung, to lay out a new town, named "Knoxville" after Secretary of War Henry Knox . McClung initially divided

729-587: Was organized by the Reverend Samuel Carrick in the 1790s, and the first church was erected adjacent to the cemetery in 1816. Shortly after the church's completion, disputes arose over several matters, including the renting of pews, and a doctrinal dispute between "Old Calvinists" and "Hopkinsians". A portion of the congregation split from First Presbyterian, and founded Second Presbyterian Church circa 1818. In 1838, hundreds Knoxvillians died when an unknown illness (possibly malaria ) swept through

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