“I enjoy the historical part of it,” Dan Bueltel said. “And working with people too, you know, it’s the farmers, the local people.”

“It’s one of them deals where, if you enjoy what you’re doing, you never work a day in your life,” Moseng said.

This year, Bueltel-Moseng Land Surveying has reached a milestone of its own. The business is marking its 50th anniversary.

The history of Bueltel-Moseng Land Surveying traces its roots back to founder Lyle Moseng. Moseng grew up in Marshall, but he had traveled a long way from Minnesota when he got interested in becoming a surveyor.

Photo by Deb Gau The tools used by surveyors have changed a lot over the past 50 years. Lyle Moseng shared some of the different models of calculators he used to use. Moseng said he started as a surveyor for engineering companies, before starting his own business in Marshall in 1976.

“I was working for an oil research company up in Alaska after I got out of the Navy. And there was a guy there that looked through the transit surveyor, he made $1,000 a month in 1965. I said, ‘I could do that,'” Moseng said. After coming back from Alaska, Moseng attended Willmar Community College and the North Dakota State College of Science. “It was something I really wanted.”

Moseng first started as a surveyor for engineering companies in states like Colorado, Idaho and Montana. The downside was that he spent a lot of time on the road.

“You’d just miss a whole family life,” Moseng said. “My wife and I decided we were just going to settle down and stay in one place.” In 1976, he started his own business in Marshall.

Dan Bueltel joined the business in 1992. Bueltel said he could also remember the moment he got interested in becoming a surveyor. After getting out of military service in 1989, Bueltel had studied to be a math teacher, and then got into landscaping instead.

“The work was very labor-intensive. We came up on this project, it was in St. Paul, and we were building a retaining wall. And these guys come up … set up their equipment, surveyed where to put the retaining wall, got in their truck and left,” Bueltel said. “I said, ‘You know what? I could do that.'”

Bueltel said Moseng helped him pursue his four-year degree. Bueltel became a licensed surveyor in 2004 and bought the business in 2008.

Today, Dan’s son Alec is working with him, and is close to getting licensed. Alec Bueltel said he used to help his dad in the summers when he was growing up. He later went to college for civil engineering, but it didn’t turn out to be a good fit.

“Two years into that, I realized it was going to be more of a desk job,” Alec said. “Then I kind of fell back to what I like to do, and what I grew up doing.”

Moseng and the Bueltels said the education required to become a land surveyor includes studying math like algebra, geometry and trigonometry. They also work with specialized equipment – although that has changed a lot over the years. When he first started working with Moseng, Dan Bueltel said Lyle was using equipment like a 200-foot steel measuring tape.

“You’ve got to take temperature into account when you’re measuring with that, too,” Alec Bueltel said of the tape.

Today, surveyors work with technology like GPS receivers and electronic distance meters.

“The technology changed so fast,” Dan Bueltel said. “We got our first GPS in 2001. And then by 2008, we were using all GPS and all computer drafting.”

Surveying is an important task for everything from construction projects, to determining where property and section lines are, Moseng and the Bueltels said.

“When we first started 50 years ago, very few people did surveying,” Moseng said. As land became more valuable, people became more concerned about making sure of where property boundaries were.

When it came to farmland, “Even 30 years ago, nobody cared if a fence was off two or three feet. Now, if it’s not within a couple feet or even a foot, people get upset,” Dan Bueltel said.

One of the fun things about surveying is finding some of the original monuments marking the corners of township sections, Dan Bueltel said.

“We did a grant project with the state the last two years. We recovered over 300 corners in Pipestone and Murray County, where we would excavate to find the original monument,” he said. “The oldest one I found was in Murray County. It was the original oak stake from 1862.”

One marker they found in a township road intersection in Murray County had been buried with a whiskey bottle standing on top of it, Alec Bueltel said.

“One of the neat ones was in Taunton and Porter, where we got in and we found the original iron or stones that laid out the town,” Moseng said. He said another notable project that they worked on was the construction of Marshall High School.

Another positive aspect of the work has been getting to know area residents over the years. Moseng and the Bueltels said they value the trust they’ve built up with people in southwest Minnesota.

“The neat thing is, after you’ve been in business so long, people trust you and respect the fact that you’re out there doing it,” Moseng said.

Dan Bueltel said it was also good to see a new generation get involved with the business.

“It’s going to carry on with Alec, who’s just as passionate about it as we are,” he said.