Acreage can
be a pretty deceptive thing. Forty
acres looks like nothing in a Kansas
wheat field. On the other hand,
it's possible to achieve a surprising
amount of privacy on just a few acres in
the forests of the Ozarks.
Maybe these
illustrations will help YOU get some idea
of the size of five acres.
Real estate
can come in any size or shape, but most
frequently, five acre parcels of land are
rectangles about 330 feet wide by 660
feet long.
Take a look
at this aerial photograph of a typical
urban area. (Okay, it's not a
typical urban area at all, it's our home
town, Willow Springs, but from up here,
everyone looks surprisingly
normal.) Notice that five acres
here will encompass seven or eight city
blocks. Looks like there may be
around 6 to 8 houses to a block, so
five acres might have twelve to sixteen home on it.
Or consider
this five acre block. Five acres would easily
contain the high-school football
field with a quarter-mile cinder track
surrounding it.
Okay,
getting dizzy from the height?
Let's try looking at it from the ground.
They put up these
power poles every 330 feet on the average (four to the
quarter-mile) so, it's the width of five acres to the
first one, the length of five acres to the second.
As my final exhibit, here's a
drawing I made to show the proper scale.
(You probably thought I just horsed
around all day.) Here, the
telephone poles look even further apart
than the ones in the photo above, but
they're drawn to scale.
One of my
purposes here is to point out that five
acres, especially five rolling acres
covered with mature forest is actually
quite a bit of ground. If you need
more privacy than five acres of woods
affords, you're likely to be arrested for
what you're doing sooner or later anyway,
so why push your luck?
2/5/98
