In the revolutionary era and the early years of statehood, North Carolina was served by a new generation of surveyors such as John Daniel, one of the original donors of land to the new state university. He worked mainly in the New Hope Creek watershed of Orange and Chatham Counties, and many of his original plats are in the envelopes of the state land grants. His map of the prominence between Morgan and Bolin Creeks is the earliest of what is now Chapel Hill.
A century later, in the days of Reconstruction and the new state constitution, the management of local taxes was taken from the courts and given to county commissioners, resulting in an immediate need for new and accurate county maps. Between the late 1870s and the mid-1890s many counties ordered maps from surveyor-engineer-cartographers such as Fendol Bevers (Wake), Will Spoon (Alamance), George Tate (Orange), and Lemuel Johnson, a mathematician at Trinity College (Davidson, Randolph, and Durham).
Not until the twentieth century and the advent of aerial surveys did county maps achieve a reliable accuracy. In the years just before World War I, the U.S. Department of Agriculture released an excellent series of soil maps, and the first of the U.S. Geological Survey maps appeared. By the twenty-first century, surveying had been enhanced by remarkable developments in field equipment-utilizing radio beams, lasers, and even global positioning via satellites-that rendered a previously unimagined accuracy.