R. B. Gould Field Books

These are currently filed in our Engineering Vault and were given to Deschutes County by the City of Bend. The collection is comprised of 44 of the survey field books from Robert Gould’s private survey practice from 1910 (FBK1) to 1940 (FBK99). Many of the books also contain City of Bend related notes, including City Monuments.

It is not known if any of the unaccounted field books are still in existence. We also received a handwritten index of some of the field books from the City.

Robert B. Gould (1883 -1940), Oregon PE 632, was a Civil Engineer and Land Surveyor who worked in Central Oregon from 1910 to 1940. He had a private surveying practice, worked for the lumber mills, the City of Bend, the State of Oregon Highway Department and was the Deschutes County Surveyor from 1919 to 1940. He platted over 60 early subdivisions and surveyed scores of county roads in Deschutes County (his road survey field books are in a different collection which has not yet been put on the internet)

To help navigate these documents, we transcribed the indexes from the front pages all of these field books into a database. Four pdf index files were generated, with the book’s data sorted by Date, Field Book, Plat Name and Township, Range and Section.

This information is supplied “as is” and no further indexing is planned for these documents. You will have to hunt and peck through these books as the index is a bare bones affair and many valuable entries may be poorly accounted for in the index.

The scans of the field books vary in size from 11 MB to 75 MB.

Many of the field books have notes about information being found in a “Calc. Book”. These Gould Calculation Books are filed elsewhere in our on-line Miscellaneous Records. The field books sometimes have cross references to the Calc. Books. For example, in Gould’s Field Book 49, Page 4, the note of “C.B. 9 P 59” refers you to Gould’s Calc. Book 9, Page 59”.

See the R. B. Gould Field Books at the Deschutes County Public Records Center Now