And now you know...

and so do I. I was looking at the assessment form for my house and it said the corner lot we are on is a total of almost 7000 square feet. For whatever reason, I thought that was about a third of an acre. At this point, I have to confess that I am bad when it comes to visualizing size and distances. Across the street there used to be a hardware store/lumber yard and about 4 houses. I had no idea how they were going to remove those buildings and replace them with a 35000 sq ft grocery store and parking for 100 cars. Yet the grocery store and parking lot are there.

So using this little thing called Google, I looked up how many square feet are in an acre. I was a little disappointed to see our lot is only 16% or about 1/6th of an acre and that an acre is 43560 square feet. Why that odd number instead of one with a lot of zeros?
I'll leave that to Tom Dorn, who is the Extension Educator for Lancaster County at the University of Nebraska at Lincoln to explain. And he throws in some etymology (thats the study of word origins for those of you in State College) as a bonus.

The unit of land area in the United States is the acre. An acre contains 43,560 square feet. Have you ever wondered why an acre is 43,560 square feet instead of a round number like 40,000 or 50,000 square feet? The story goes like this. When plowing with a yoke of oxen, it was standard practice to rest the animals (and the farmer) after plowing a furrow 1/8 mile long. An eighth of a mile therefore became known as a furrow-long or furlong; (a furlong is a nearly forgotten term for distance, except at horse racing tracks where it remains in common use).

The usual practice after plowing a furlong was to then turn the team around on a "land" and plow the other direction. Lands were laid out so the farmer would be able to finish a land every 10 rounds with a 10 inch plowshare (about 16.5 feet). One could imagine that perhaps farmers used a pole or rod that was 16.5 feet long when laying out lands because this measure of distance is still called a rod today.

By starting early in the morning, two lands could be finished before noon with a good yoke of oxen. At noon, the farmer stopped for his noon meal and to feed, water, and rest his animals. After the noon break, another two lands could be finished before quitting time. Four lands, or forty rounds (80 furrows) measured 16.5 x 4 = 66 feet across by 1/8 mile (660 feet) long and was considered a good days work with a walking plow. The area plowed was therefore 43,560 square feet and became the standard unit of land area we call an acre.

By the way, a farmer who plowed 80 furrows an eighth of a mile long would have walked ten miles while wrestling with the hand guided walking plow. Is it any wonder this measure of land area became known as an acre (ache-er)! Actually, the Webster's New Collegiate Dictionary states that the name comes from the Old English ‘aecer'; akin to Old High German ‘ackar' (field), Latin ‘ager' (field), Greek ‘agros' (field), or Latin ‘agere' (to drive).