Land subdivision on the Holland Purchase in western New York State, 1797–1820

Abstract

During the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, large private land companies shaped important elements of eastern North America's frontier landscape. In westernmost New York State, a group of Dutch investors known as the Holland Land Company acquired control of 3.3 million acres of undeveloped land. Their imprint on the area's evolving human geography was direct and enduring. In particular, the region's survey system reflected the concerns and decisions of the frontier developers. The study, utilizing records both in New York State and in Amsterdam, describes how the Dutch, between 1797 and 1820, divided much of the tract into six-mile-square, cardinally oriented townships and how these units, in turn, were subdivided into a more detailed pattern of individual lots. In addition, the investors and their agents platted a half-dozen Company-financed village nuclei to act as local centers of commercial activity. The geometry of the original survey landscape of townships, lots, and village centers can be traced to varied historical roots. The Dutch and their principal agent, Joseph Ellicott, actively borrowed from other contemporary land surveying and town planning traditions in upstate New York, New England, the Ohio country, the mid-Atlantic states, and elsewhere. The result was a fusion of those commonly used survey conventions of the period which seemed best suited to the needs of the Company and to the physical makeup of the region. The survey systems adopted by Ellicott and the Dutch on the Holland Purchase were not abstract impulses of Newtonian rationalism or republican individualism; rather, they were concrete expressions of a search for practical and functional solutions to the complex problems of managing and improving a large tract of real estate in the early nineteenth-century wilderness of eastern North America.