On the Kansas-Nebraska state line ? Most people don’t even know what the First Guide Meridian East stone is, Nebraska and Kansas surveyors say.

But, to them, the stone is a relic, a navigational star that helped establish Nebraska and Kansas.

The stone, buried in the middle of an intersection on a remote county road on the Nebraska-Kansas state line, is Nebraska’s first north-south surveyed line, said Jerry Penry, a land surveyor for the Lancaster County Engineer’s Office.

The limestone block will be 150 years old Friday and a group of surveyors plan to commemorate how it helped shape the region by placing a brass cap on the stone and reburying it.

The line was used by surveyors to establish all township and section lines east to the Missouri River, north to the South Dakota border and south into Kansas. Later, it was used as a reference point for public land surveys to the west.

“Without it, you wouldn’t have the land system we have today,” Penry said.

All private ownership for homesteads in Nebraska and Kansas came from surveys using the stone as their guide, said Steve Brosemer, president of Geotech Inc., a land surveying firm in Emporia, Kan.

In March, Penry and other surveyors dug up the stone, finding a rough limestone block that measured 30 inches tall, 22 inches wide and 6 inches thick. A chunk of the formerly 48-inch rock was missing.

Penry attributes that to time and its location at an intersection. A third of the rock used to be on top of the ground, he said.

In 1854, a U.S. deputy surveyor named John P. Johnson was sent to establish a base line at the 40th parallel of latitude for Nebraska and Kansas. Surveying land was an essential step for the two territories to be granted statehood.

Charles A. Manners and Joseph Ledlie, also U.S. deputy surveyors, were sent to continue surveying based on Johnson’s line months later. They realized Johnson had misjudged and placed the stone more than 4,000 feet too far south.

Manners placed the stone in its correct place on June 24, 1855.

Had Ledlie and Manners not corrected the mistakes, the current shapes of Kansas and Nebraska would be different, Brosemer said.

“The lines would have been a little crooked.” he said. “Kansas would have been a little shorter north and south and Nebraska would have been a little longer.”