Actually, the defined boundaries of the colonies at first were ludicrous, because they were impossible. If you set boundaries for a housing lot, someone does a survey- essentially, makes a map. But the boundaries of the different colonies were often described , set down, by officials in England who had little knowledge of North Atlantic geography, and too little thought about whether their descriptions overlapped with previous ones. That created a number of problems, and some were not settled by 1776.

Perhaps the most famous of these was the boundary between Maryland and Pennsylvania. Maryland was first- in 1632 the proprietor, Lord Calvert, it was granted all the land bordering the Potomac River up to the 40th parallel. In 1681 Charles II granted William Penn land north of that Maryland border, but because he referred to a very inaccurate map, the description of the boundary actually set the border north of what's now Philadelphia. More trouble arose when a further grant by King James II gave Penn much of the lower Delaware river valley- which Maryland had already claimed. To keep the land from being settled, in 1679 Calvert gave a relative, Irishman George Talbot, 32,000 acres there if he would bring hundreds of settlers. Talbot didn't bring more than 60 settlers, but he brought plenty of attitude, and some settlers who'd bought land in what they thought was Pennsylvania were surprised when Talbot stormed up to their houses with an armed retinue and announced that they were paying taxes to him, now ; and if they didn't he'd burn their crops. That border dispute had to be settled by the famous Mason-Dixon survey, and , later , the creation of the colony of Delaware. But, even then there was a problem defining the boundary of the corners, because of how King James had defined it:

all that the Towne of Newcastle otherwise called Delaware and All that Tract of Land lying within the Compass or Circle of 12 Miles about the same scituate lying and being upon the River Delaware in America And all Islands in the same River Delaware and the said River and Soyle thereof lying North of the Southermost part of the said Circle of 12 Miles about the said Towne.

The circle was put in the wrong place. The result of this odd little description was what's now called the Twelve-Mile Circle. Because circles and straight lines often don't meet up very well, that created something called The Wedge . The Wedge would not get finally be given officially to Delaware until 1921.

Then there were grants within colonies. In the mid 16th c. Lord Fairfax was given a chunk of Virginia by Charles II, described as being between the Potomac and Rappahanock Rivers, up to the headwaters of the Potomac. That area, called The Northern Neck, acquired more and more colonists. By the early 1700's many of these were squatters, as the Lord Fairfax of 1720 ( sitting in England) felt no great need to sell or hand over any of his land. This greatly annoyed Virginia Governor Gooch, as these were essentially Virginians living tax-free ( and, actually there was much more general Virginia governmental annoyance over the Norther Neck Grant than this: it is complicated). Gooch decided to define the headwaters of the Potomac River as being what is now Harper's Ferry, where it meets the Shenandoah, decreed the rest upriver as being Virginia: and started selling land. The final decision in 1746 set the headwaters at what's now called The Fairfax Stone, at the southwest corner of Maryland. But the legal dispute between Gooch's settlers and Fairfax lasted to 1786.

Then there were the conflicting claims the colonies made to adjoining lands. A good example of this would be Vermont. After the end of the French and Indian War left the area open, it was claimed by New Hampshire, Massachusetts, and New York. George II put an end to Massachusetts' claim, in 1740, and New Hampshire's governor began to settle the Champlain valley. But when George III set the boundary between New York and New Hampshire, in 1764, that territory became within New York's borders, and New York refused to honor the land grants of those Champlain settlers. The settlers rebelled (before Ethan Allen and the Green Mountain Boys fought the British in 1776, they fought New York). Eventually, after the Revolutionary War and a short military flourish by New York at taking it, Vermont was created as a state.

Bad surveying also made for a mess within the colonies, even more after the end of the War of Independence opened up territories to the west. One of the most important things that happened during the Articles of Confederation period, before the Constitution, was the Northwest Ordnance of 1787, which finally set down how new territories were to be added to the Sates, how they were to be surveyed, and how they were to become new States. And not a moment too soon, as land speculators had already filed so many overlapping claims in what's now Kentucky and West Virginia that feuds were still being fought over them in the 1840's.