Definition
LOCATION carries distinct meanings in American land law, mining law, and civil law. The common thread across all uses is the formal act of identifying, designating, or fixing a particular place or tract.
1. American Land Law (General). The designation of the boundaries of a particular piece of land, either upon record or upon the land itself. More specifically, the act of finding and marking out the bounds of a tract on the ground, in conformity with a description contained in an entry, grant, patent, or map. The description employed in making such a location consists of what are called "locative calls" — references in the instrument that fix the tract to specific physical points on the landscape.
2. Public Land / Warrant Location. The act of selecting and designating lands that a person is authorized by law to claim or survey. In the era of land warrants and bounty grants, a warrant holder or surveyor "located" land by selecting and surveying the specific acreage authorized by the warrant. The act of choosing the land and running the survey together constituted the location. In Pennsylvania practice, the term extended to any application for land under public authority, identifying a specific parcel within the authorized acreage.
3. Mining Law. The act by which a miner claims a mineral deposit on public land — staking out the claim and posting or recording the required notices. A valid mining location both identifies the claim on the ground and, when properly recorded, establishes the claimant's possessory rights against subsequent entrants. The procedures governing location are primarily statutory and vary by jurisdiction and mineral type.
4. Civil and Scots Law. A contract for the temporary use of a chattel or the services of a person for an agreed hire. This usage is the civil-law equivalent of a lease or hire contract — what Roman law called locatio conductio. It has virtually no presence in modern American common-law courts but appears in historical sources treating civil law and in older Scots legal texts.
Common Language
Modern common usage (Wiktionary): A particular point or place in physical space; an act of locating.
Historical common usage (Webster's 1913): The act or process of locating; situation, place, or locality; that which is located; a tract of land designated in place.
The common meaning — a place or spot — is thinner than the legal meaning in every context above. In land law and mining law, location is not merely the place where something is found; it is the formal legal act of claiming or designating that place, with defined procedural steps whose completion determines whether rights attach. A researcher who reads "location" in a historical deed, survey, or mining statute and understands it only as a place-name will miss the operative legal significance entirely.
Common Confusion
LOCATION vs. ENTRY. In early American public land practice, an "entry" was the initial record or claim registered with a land office, while "location" referred to the physical act of surveying and marking the boundaries on the ground. The two were legally distinct steps, and a defective location could defeat an otherwise valid entry. Historical sources sometimes use the terms loosely or interchangeably, which can obscure whether the claimant had completed both steps required to perfect title.
LOCATION vs. SURVEY. Location designates and identifies; survey measures and maps. A location may be accomplished by staking and posting without a full survey, particularly in mining law. The legal significance of when each act occurs — and which came first — matters in priority disputes.
Core Elements
For a valid land location under American public land law, sources generally require:
- Authority: The locating party must hold a warrant, patent, or statutory right authorizing them to select land.
- Identification: The boundaries of the specific tract must be designated, either by physical marking on the ground or by description on record.
- Conformity: The location must correspond to the description in the governing instrument — locative calls must be reconcilable with the ground.
- Notice (mining): In mining location, posting of notice at the discovery point and on the claim, plus recordation with the appropriate office, are typically required by statute.
Why It Matters in Research
The word "location" is one of the most deceptively variable terms in historical American land and mining law research. Its meaning shifts depending on the era, the jurisdiction, the type of land being claimed, and whether the source is a deed, a statute, a surveyor's field notes, or a court opinion.
In early American land law — particularly in states like Kentucky, Tennessee, Virginia, and Pennsylvania where land was distributed through warrants — location was a term of art with procedural content. Whether a location had been properly "made" determined priority between competing claimants on overlapping grants. Researchers working with colonial and early national land records must understand that "location" signals a legal act, not merely a geographic description.
In mining law, the term acquired a second robust technical life in the nineteenth century. The federal Mining Act of 1872 and the body of state law surrounding it use "location" as the foundational act of acquiring a placer or lode claim. Historical corpus materials on mining rights — particularly those from the western states — will be dense with procedural requirements for valid location, and the validity of the location is often the central issue in title disputes.
The civil-law sense (hire/lease contract) is a trap for researchers in a different direction. It appears in Bouvier, Rapalje, and older dictionaries covering Roman and Scots law. If you encounter "location" in a source with civil-law roots or in a Louisiana or Scots context, it may have nothing to do with land boundaries and everything to do with contract law.
The Wiktionary note about an apartheid-era South African usage (a non-white township) is historically significant for researchers working in that context but is entirely foreign to American or English legal sources.
Historical Dictionary Support
The historical dictionaries are in substantial agreement on the American land-law sense. Black's (both editions), Burrill, and Bouvier all define location as the act of designating and marking boundaries, and all connect it to warrants, entries, and locative calls. Burrill's treatment is particularly concise and closely tracks Black's.
Bouvier adds the most detail on the warrant process and is useful for understanding location in the context of Pennsylvania land practice, where the administrative steps were distinct from Virginia or Kentucky practice. Rapalje & Lawrence usefully captures both the general American land sense and the civil-law hire sense in a single entry, making it a helpful bridge dictionary for researchers encountering older sources that might blend the two traditions.
What the historical dictionaries largely omit is the mature mining-law sense. The mining-law definition is incomplete in several of these sources or absent entirely — reflecting that the formal federal mining location system developed primarily after many of these dictionaries were compiled or last substantially revised. Researchers relying solely on older dictionary definitions for mining law location will find them inadequate; statute and case law must supplement the dictionary record.
None of the historical dictionaries address the South African or modern administrative usage. These are not gaps in the legal sense — they were simply not part of the legal world these sources addressed.
Jurisdictional Note
Mining location requirements vary significantly between federal public lands (governed primarily by the Mining Law of 1872) and state law, which may impose additional requirements for notice, recordation, and assessment work. In states where the civil law tradition persists — particularly Louisiana — "location" in older sources may invoke the hire-contract meaning rather than the land-survey meaning. Early land-state practice (Virginia, Kentucky, Pennsylvania, Tennessee) developed distinct procedural vocabularies around location that differ from each other and from later federal public land law.
Encyclopedia Cross-Reference
See: Mining Claims; Public Land Law; Land Warrants and Grants; Locative Calls