Land Company Grants

Two books the explain the early land companies of New York are:

Chazanof, William. Joseph Ellicot and the Holland Land Company : The Opening of Western New York. Syracuse, N.Y. : Syracuse University Press, 1970.

Conover, George Stillwell, The Genesee Tract: Cessions between New York and Massachusetts - The Phelps and Gorham Purchase - Robert Morris - Captain Charles Williamson and the Pulteney Estate. Geneva, N.Y.: 1889.

Maps of the areas covered by these land companies give an idea of their size. Since these were private individuals who owned these lands, the records of their transfers would not be found in the official records of the federal, state, or county, but in the manuscript papers of the individual companies involved. Thus one would need to look at archives and manuscript collections. Bibliographies in the books above would be helpful for the state of New York for example. Land companies were in existence long before the United States came to be. Consider the colonizing of Ireland with the early British and Scottish settlers, for example.

The New England Township Survey will be covered in the next lesson, but the rest of the colonies were using the metes and bounds survey.