Skinner—Appraisal of Railroad Property. 805 
In the first place, the best maps to be obtained were secured.® 
With the help of these maps, lists of sections lying in strips 
approximately two miles wide with the railways through the 
center were made out and arranged so far as possible in the or¬ 
der of their numbers. A clerk then scanned the registers’ re¬ 
ports covering that particular region and made a record of 
■each sale that had taken place within the two-mile-wide strip 
and recorded in his notebook a brief description of the parcel, 
its acreage, the consideration and the last previous assessment. 9 10 
The rates for a particular section of road were ar¬ 
ranged by years, so that from them it was an easy 
matter to determine the average price for any one 
year or for the five-year period. This acreage for the 
five-year period was then recorded as the “average sale price” 
for the land. The inspectors were then sent into the field to col¬ 
lect data in the way of opinions from men actually familiar 
with the land lying along the line of the road, and to judge 
from personal inspection the value of the right of w T av. Finally, 
the names of many reliable business men, farmers, etc., liv¬ 
ing along the line of road were obtained, and to these a 
printed form was sent which they were asked to return to the 
office of the board of assessment with their estimate of the acre 
value of the right of way through a certain section. From 
these data, the inspector, after weighing all the evidence at 
hand, put down what was in his opinion the ordinary value 
per acre of the right of way along the line. Where sharp dif- 
9 Considerable difficulty was experienced in securing sufficiently ac¬ 
curate maps. The railroad commissioner’s map of Wisconsin is excel¬ 
lent, but it is too small. The difficulty was even greater in the case 
of the small towns. In September 1903, the writer saw in the office 
of one of the registers a recorded plat for an incorporated village which 
was a mere rough pencil sketch; and so far as he could learn, no other 
existed. 
loThese assessments were not used in the case of the farm lands 
except to assist the inspector in discovering whether the consideration 
was the true one, and for this purpose rarely. For example, when the 
assessed value far exceeded the consideration, this fact was ordinarily 
accepted as prima facie evidence that the consideration was not the 
true one. So it usually proved when the full information concerning 
the transfer was obtained. 
