Vietnam Veterans Memorial
As-Built Survey

Project Overview

A Survey Where Position Was Not the Only Thing That Mattered

Dedicated in 1991, the memorial sits on reclaimed lakefront ground in Milwaukee's Veterans Park. Three granite columns stand for those killed in action, those held as prisoners or still missing, and those who came home. Below them, a fan of engraved bricks carries the names - rank, branch and date - of the people the memorial exists for.

After thirty-five years the ground had settled and buckled, and the pavers had eroded. The fix was a full rebuild: lift the entire brick field, lay a new base, and reinstall. That created an unusual survey problem. A normal as-built records where things are. Here, the record also had to be legible, because some of the engraving had worn past the point where a person standing over it could read the name.

Working for Craig T. Ellsworth, Architect, of Avalon Investments Group Inc., who administered the project for the hardscape contractor, Lynch was asked to field-measure the pavers, paving, benches and structures as they stood - and to take elevations on a grid, so any drainage problem could be found before the bricks went back down rather than after.

Method

Four Feet Off the Ground, Flown by Hand

The work began with control. Six points were set around the memorial and tied to each other within 0.01 of a foot, giving every later measurement something to check against.

The capture itself had to be flown manually. Mapping software will not collect data at the altitude this job needed - roughly four feet above the pavers - so our FAA-certificated remote pilot, Sr. Survey Crew Chief Seth Oldenburg, flew a three-foot grid across the entire site by hand, passing over every brick from several angles. That produced thousands of photographs, each geolocated with RTK GPS.

Photogrammetry assembled those images into a dense point cloud and a single orthomosaic, which was then crosschecked back against the conventional survey and the site control to confirm it held survey-grade accuracy across the whole site - not just in the middle, where photogrammetry always looks good.

Detail from the orthophoto. This is not a ground photograph - it is the aerial survey product, at the resolution that let worn engraving be read and transcribed.

Construction

Then Back in September, to Stake It

Recording the memorial was only half the job. Once the base was in, the geometry had to be set out again on the ground - and the memorial is almost entirely curves. The plaza is an oval, the brick field is a fan, and the walks are arcs struck from radius points. Curves are the one thing a crew cannot rebuild by eye.

In September our crew returned to stake the layout: radius points, semi-circle midpoints, and offsets held two feet clear of tangent and radius so the stakes survived the work going on around them, all at finished grade. That is what let the contractor rebuild the arcs true to the shape the July survey had recorded, rather than approximately.

Outcome

Rebuilt, and Back Where It Belonged

Removal began in July 2026. The memorial was rebuilt on a new base with new walks, and all 2,946 bricks were reset - in the layout the survey recorded, with the names intact. It was rededicated on Veterans Day 2026.

Lynch's part was the survey and the layout. The credit for the restoration belongs to the War Memorial Center, who raised the money and ran the project, and to Pat Connerton of Pro Hardscape & Lawn and the crews who did the physical work. What the survey contributed was certainty: that the field going back down matched the field that came up, and that no name was lost in between.

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