Original surveys and abstract numbers, with metes and bounds underneath. Here is what the legal description on your deed, lease or division order is actually telling you, and where to check it for free.
Texas uses not plss. Original surveys and abstract numbers, with metes and bounds underneath.
Texas kept its own public domain when it was annexed in 1845 and never entered the federal rectangular survey. Spain and Mexico had already disposed of roughly 26.3 million acres before independence, leaving the Republic about 225.3 million acres of unappropriated land. Those older titles were honored, and Spanish civil law practice is the reason Texas descriptions run on metes and bounds rather than on a grid.
A vara is fixed in Texas at 33 and one third inches. A league, or sitio, is 4,428.4 acres and was grazing land. A labor is 177.1 acres and was cropland. Under the Mexican colonization law of 1825 a settler could receive a league and a labor, and a Republic of Texas first class headright was one league and one labor, 4,605.5 acres.
A survey is the original grant tract itself, named for the original grantee. An abstract number is the identifier assigned to that grant in the county's abstract of original land titles. In the Texas General Land Office database, abstract numbers are searched county by county, because an abstract number only means something with its county attached.
Railroads received 32,153,878 acres, nearly a fifth of the state, surveyed as 640 acre sections laid out in squares with alternate sections kept for the Public School Fund. This is why West Texas descriptions look like PLSS: Section, Block, Township. The Township there is a railroad block tier, not a PLSS township, and there is no principal meridian behind it. The Texas and Pacific Reserve west of the Pecos was run in 1878 and 1879 with magnetic compasses and no correction for curvature, and it still produces boundary litigation.
East and Central Texas:
80 acres of land, more or less, out of the WILLIAM SMITH SURVEY, Abstract No. 412, Cooke County, Texas, being the same land described in that deed recorded in Volume 123, Page 456, Deed Records of Cooke County, Texas.
West Texas:
Section 22, Block 34, Township 3 South, T. & P. Ry. Co. Survey, Abstract No. 1147, Reeves County, Texas, containing 640 acres, more or less.
Both are written to correct form as illustrations. Neither is quoted from a specific recorded instrument.
Abstract numbers are assigned per county. The same abstract number exists in nearly every Texas county and points at different land in each one, so an heir who writes down A-412 without the county has written down nothing. Worse, when a survey straddles a county line it gets a different abstract number in each county, meaning one tract of dirt carries two numbers.
Deeds are with the county clerks.
What it covers, how many net mineral acres it actually is, and whether anything is producing on it. Free, no obligation, and the answer does not change if you never sell anything to us. We do this every day and it usually takes us an hour.
Ask a Landman Get a Free ValuationCompiled from BLM, state land offices, state archives and statute, current as of 2026-08. Berlin Royalties is a mineral buyer and a landman shop in Tulsa, not a law firm or a licensed surveyor. Nothing here is a boundary opinion, and a description that matters to a transaction should be run by a title attorney or a licensed surveyor in the state where the land sits.