Land Surveys in Ste. Genevieve County, Missouri

Most of Missouri was surveyed into the rectangular townships, ranges, and sections of the federal Public Land Survey System. The oldest part of Ste. Genevieve County wasn't -- it was divided under French colonial custom into long, narrow common-field strips more than a century before Missouri statehood, and that history still shows up in parcel shapes and legal descriptions today.

This page covers what's specific to Ste. Genevieve County. For the general explanation, see the national guide.

Why this county's oldest land doesn't follow the standard grid

Ste. Genevieve, founded in 1735, is the oldest permanent European settlement in Missouri -- it predates both American statehood and the federal Public Land Survey System (PLSS) that later carved most of the state into a grid of townships, ranges, and one-mile-square sections. Instead, French colonial settlers here followed a land-division custom common in parts of France and Quebec: each household received a house lot in town plus one or more strips in a shared "common field," most famously "Le Grand Champ" (the Big Field), the main agricultural common field for old Ste. Genevieve. These strips ran perpendicular to the Mississippi River back toward the bluffs, were typically about one arpent (roughly 192.5 feet) wide, and could run up to forty arpents (roughly a mile) long -- giving every landholder a share of both river-adjacent and interior land rather than one compact block.

This wasn't a brief historical footnote: the pattern persisted in local land use and, in places, formal division for well over a century -- as late as 1907, the Big Field was reportedly still being cultivated in its historic long-lot strips. When the United States took over Missouri, it generally had to recognize and confirm pre-existing French and Spanish land grants rather than resurvey them into the PLSS grid, which is why this arpent-based pattern survived into the American land-records system rather than being erased by it.

What this means for a modern survey or title search

If you're buying land in or near Ste. Genevieve's historic district, or in the old common-field bottomland along the Mississippi, a title search may turn up a legal description that references arpents, French long-lot boundaries, or a historic land-grant survey rather than a clean PLSS section/township/range description. That's not necessarily a defect -- it's a reflection of genuinely older, legally recognized land division -- but it does mean a modern boundary survey needs to reconcile old arpent measurements and historic monuments (which may no longer physically exist) with current GPS-based methods. Not every local surveyor works with this kind of history routinely, so it's worth asking directly whether the firm you hire has experience with Ste. Genevieve's colonial-era land grants specifically, rather than assuming any licensed Missouri surveyor will find this straightforward.

Practically, this affects a fairly narrow slice of the county: land close to the historic district and the immediate river-bottom common fields, not rural acreage generally. If your target parcel is well outside that historic core, it was very likely surveyed under the standard system used across the rest of Missouri, and this consideration doesn't apply. Either way, pulling the full chain of title and any historic plat or land-grant documentation at the Recorder of Deeds office before closing is the right first step, followed by a current boundary survey rather than reliance on an old legal description alone.

Land Surveys in Ste. Genevieve County, Missouri

Why this county's oldest land doesn't follow the standard grid

What this means for a modern survey or title search

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