Surveyor’s Week is a great time to recognize the work of surveyors and their contributions, not only within the United States, but around the world. In our many blogs about surveying and famous surveyors, we’ve mainly focused on this country, but surveying is just as important around the world as it is here.

Surveying is one of the few professions where practitioners truly leave their mark, both physically, with survey markers, as well as in recorded history. Sometimes this work is truly monumental, as is the case with Alice Cunningham Fletcher.

Fletcher was born into wealth – her father was a prominent New York attorney, and her mother came from a wealthy Bostonian family. Unfortunately, her father’s health was poor and the family moved to Havana, Cuba shortly before Fletcher was born in the hopes the climate there would improve his health. However, the climate change didn’t work, and her father passed away in 1939 when Fletcher was only a year old.