HARN Station Bruce Has Been Diligently Doing Nothing Since 1872
How do we know where stuff is? By measuring distances to reference points called survey monuments installed around the landscape by various units of government. How do we establish correct locations for the survey monuments? By measuring their distance to a set of very old, very stable known points established by the National Geodetic Survey, a unit of the United States Department of Commerce. The array of reference points is currently known as the High Accuracy Reference Network (HARN) but early versions of it predate the acronym by more than 100 years.
HARN Station Bruce aka the Bruce Reset is situated just a few-hundred feet east of campus. You may not have noticed it - it's in the middle of a corn field and its job is to sit absolutely still about 4 feet under ground and be in exactly the same place each time someones goes looking for it. Data sheets for geodetic markers including Bruce can be obtained from the NGS Datasheet Retrieval Page