Abraham Lincoln surveyed the town of Petersburg, certifying its plat on February 17, 1836, five days after his twenty-seventh birthday while still living in New Salem, and he later surveyed several additions to the plat. Though self-taught, he was proficient enough that modern surveyors, following his original notes, found an original "old broken pot with a bottle in it" that he had buried as a corner marker more than a century earlier. Tradition holds that he intentionally skewed one of Petersburg's street lines to avoid cutting through a poor squatter's property, or in another version the home of a Black Hawk War widow. Lincoln reportedly worked with only a small crew, doing much of the labor himself and sometimes without a horse, joking that he was somewhat of a "hoss" himself. As a deputy county surveyor in the mid-1830s, he conducted surveys throughout the area, laying out thirty-three properties, five towns, and three roads. Such posts were political patronage appointments, and although most local residents were Democrats, a prominent Democrat appointed Lincoln deputy surveyor in 1833; later, as he rose to prominence as a Whig, he and his old friends in the area drifted apart politically. Surveyors, then called "landlookers," endured rough conditions that tore their clothes and exposed them to winter cold, summer heat, and insects. Lincoln once received a surveying fee in buckskins, which he gave to Hannah Armstrong to sew into protective coverings for his pants, and on another occasion Rhoda Clary mended his torn breeches while he sat on her bed wrapped in the covers. The knowledge of people and places gained through such frontier surveying could be valuable to ambitious men, as it had also been for George Washington.