Furlong the fundamental unit of land measurement. A furlong was forty rods, an acre four by 40 rods, or four rods by one furlong, and thus 160 square rods. At the time, the Saxons used the North German foot, which was 10 percent longer than the foot of today. When England changed to the shorter foot in the late 13th century, rods and furlongs remained unchanged, since property boundaries were already defined in rods and furlongs. The only thing that changed was the number of feet and yards in a rod or a furlong, and the number of square feet and
Philip Joseph Furlong Furlong became the first principal of Cardinal Hayes High School in the Bronx until 1945 and served as secretary of education for the New York archdiocese. In 1950, he was named pastor of St. Thomas More in Manhattan, a post he held until retiring in 1969. Furlong was active in many educational and historical societies. Catholic elementary school students across the United States learned American history from his eight-volume textbook series, "The Furlong History Series," written in the 1920s through 1940s. He was a national chaplain for the Girl Scouts from 1946 to 1955. Furlong was national Catholic chaplain of