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The frontier was virtually everywhere in America, and a day’s ride into the interior from any settlement revealed an almost impenetrable forest broken only by the trails and fields of Native Americans. For the Europeans, the thought that North America was a wilderness populated with wild men and savages was a great advantage to the newcomer who wished to establish his own claim to land in the New World. Land and its legal disposition were of no small regard to the first settlers in America, and they took the legalities of property transfer and tenure quite seriously.“Any person who neglects hunting out good lands, and in some measure marking and distinguishing them for his own, in order to keep others from settling them will never regain it.” — George Washington, 1767In the mid-18th century many settlers, disgusted with the machinations of the various land companies, agents, and politicians, avoided the practice of surveying their land claims altogether and simply marked boundaries themselves by cutting notches in trees or making piles of stones at the corners of boundaries. Indian paths and streambeds continued to be used by the whites to define the boundaries of purchases and land grants, sometimes creating difficulties in future years when assessing the legitimate limits of ownership between those who had conflicting legal interests. This ad hoc system of land division was plagued by mistakes and conflicting claims that made proof of land ownership after the Revolution difficult and costly.Just how wild a region had to be to qualify as a wilderness in the minds of colonial settlers is not certain. Some small amount of previous settlement—such as well established Native villages and burial grounds—seems to have been tolerated as a sign of ownership, while any form of civilization that failed to demonstrate its influence in European terms—cartways, buildings, barns, and fenced fields—seems to have been dismissed. The Dutch in Manhattan and Long Island had purchased land from the tribes, and the Moravians of Pennsylvania had scrupulously acknowledged repeated Native land claims paying for the same parcels several times. In the 17th century William Penn had made a large purchased in the Delaware Valley that was turned into a fraud (The Walking Purchase) by the agents of his heirs who manipulated the somewhat ambiguous terms of the agreement in 1735 to dislocate virtually all of its aboriginal owners among the Delaware nation.Privileged friends of the Crown and numerous charter companies were given grants of land in the colonies amounting to hundreds of thousands of acres. Land was a form of wealth, but if it could not be put into production, it was simply a liability for its proprietors. These men attempted to transform their land into cash by selling or renting it. Property agents and speculators attempted to make a profit through these land transactions the way realty agents do today, but they could make no commissions unless the price of the land was within reach of those who were willing to occupy, clear, and plow it.Prior to the Seven Years’ War (1756–1763), surveyors were equal participants in marketing huge tracts of land in areas of the colonial frontier with large companies such as the Ohio Company. The acquisition of a patent for the Ohio Company was the ostensible reason for Lawrence Washington’s trip to England in 1749 as evidenced by his letters to the colonial governor and others. Lawrence Washington—eldest sibling of George Washington—also selected and promoted the site of the new town of Alexandria, Virginia on the western banks of the Potomac near to his own land holdings. He deemed this a suitable location because its deep water access allowed ships from London to sail directly to the wharf, where it was thought they could best serve the land development objectives of the Ohio Company for which he was an agent. The fortunes of the Ohio Company improved when Robert Dinwiddie, whose financial interest in the Ohio Company preceded his arrival in America, became governor of Virginia in 1751 and faded again when he resigned due to ill health in 1757. Following the many years of war with the French that stifled development of their patents, the Ohio Company shareholders, who had spent over ₤310,000 to advance the company before the French and Indian War, believed that with the final British victory in North America their land business would be renewed and a profit would finally be realized.Before 1729, when the proprietors abandoned their land grants in the region to the Crown, a full survey of any patent at the buyer’s expense was required to begin the process of getting title. This made securing such patents virtually impossible for small farmers because of the expense involved in doing the survey and drawing the plat map of the grant. When the elected assemblies of the newly separated colonies of North and South Carolina took over control of the land patent system, changes were made to the procedures for surveying and distributing land that lowered costs substantially through the sale of previously surveyed parcels and tracts. Colonial officials made short cuts in order to move the process along, and it soon became easier for land speculators to amass huge amounts of acreage. Between 1731 and 1738 over one million acres were added to the tax rolls in the Carolinas alone.In the colonies, young gentlemen dominated the position of surveyor either as an occupation and a source of income, or as a preoccupation and a productive hobby. There were no formal courses of study to become a surveyor, but from colonial times the College of William and Mary had set some loose performance standards for the profession in Virginia and Maryland. Young gentlemen could train themselves, however, through reading such books as Robert Gibson’s Treatise on Surveying (1767) or John Love’s GEODESIA, The Art of Surveying and Measuring of Land Made Easie (1720), but a foundation in mathematics, hands-on practice in the field, and influential connections within government were essential to pursuing a moneymaking career. The fundamental job of a surveyor was to help implement the transfer of land from the Crown to private ownership. The process started with the purchaser’s selection of a tract. The county surveyor recorded it in an entry book and commonly charged the applicant at the rate of five shillings for every fifty acres surveyed. This was above and beyond the patent fees paid to the colonial officials.Peter Jefferson, father of Thomas Jefferson, served as the second of two surveyors acting for the Crown in Virginia. Joshua Fry and Peter Jefferson were selected by the Crown in 1749 to extend the survey boundary between Virginia and North Carolina. Beginning where a 1728 survey by William Mayo had stopped, Fry and Jefferson carried the line ninety miles into the mountains to the west. In 1751, they collaborated on a map of Virginia that became the standard cartographic reference of the colony in the 18th century. Among the other young surveyors representing the interests of the colony were George William Fairfax (age 23), James Genn (age 30), and George Washington (who went forth with his mother’s permission at age 16). At a remarkably young age and largely through the influence of the Fairfax family, George Washington was thereafter appointed official surveyor for the frontier county of Culpepper. In a letter in 1767 to William Crawford, a Pennsylvania surveyor, George Washington wrote concerning his own interests in circumventing the restrictive frontier policy as expressed in the Proclamation of 1763. Crawford had just informed him concerning two desirable tracts near Fort Pitt—but within the restricted zone—in which purchase Washington might be interested.The first arrivals to New England in 1620 benefited from the abandoned fields of the Native Americans. Two years of poor production and rising discontent over the continuation of communal farming at Plymouth (the first failure of communal socialism in America) caused the Puritans to parcel out the land thereafter in lots of twenty acres. Each person in a family received an allotment with no family being given more than one hundred acres. The parcels were randomly distributed among the existing fields in long strips much as yardlands had been assigned in Medieval English villages. Each allotted family tract was assured a frontage on the ocean or on a navigable stream so that small boats and barges could provide transportation.Ultimately the long discontinuous strips of farmland were sold, exchanged, and consolidated into family fields, and it was found that the new system of family farming caused overall productivity to increase. By 1638 there were 356 separate fields under cultivation in the Plymouth Colony covering five square miles. The division of land among families and the establishment of a feasible pattern of family farmsteads during the first decades of Puritan colonization set the standard for New England farming thereafter.The New England legislatures had allotted lands collectively to different church groups whose religious leaders partitioned the allotments among their congregations as they pleased. This precedent was followed in many parts of New England. In Wallingford, Connecticut, for instance, grants were given in three unequal divisions of 476 acres, 357 acres, and 238 acres with little regard to their equal economic potential. The succeeding generations of New England farmers found it difficult to add to their acreage especially in the rocky coastal regions. This forced families to seek additional land to disperse to their children many days journey away from their initial holdings.In New York huge land grants were made to influential individuals instead of to disparate groups. The resulting patroon system, left over from the Dutch, was followed up and down the Hudson Valley, and powerful families like the Livingston’s, the Phillips’s, and the Warren’s preempted individual ownership through an almost feudal system of tenancy and rents populated by German-speaking Europeans recruited for the purpose.In Pennsylvania, land could be purchased from the proprietor through his agents. In 1763 Charles Mason and Jeremiah Dixon fixed the boundaries in the region in the form of the Mason-Dixon Line. The line was established to end a boundary dispute between the British colonies of Maryland and Pennsylvania/Delaware. One hundred acres could be had for between ₤5 and ₤15 sterling, equivalent to 1s to 3s per acre in coin, or approximately a day’s wage for a craftsman for each unimproved acre. While a handful of Quaker and German (Pennsylvania Dutch is a misnomer) farms reached 1000 acres, the majority was between 100 and 400 acres. All deeds for land ownership were in the name of the male head of household. Most German fathers divested their land during their lifetimes on their children when they married or when they reached majority; but they tried to maintain a “home place” within the family by acquiring land for divestiture to their sons and daughters in the vicinity of their own farmsteads. Most men devolved the “home place” into the hands of a son—often the youngest son—on the event of their own death.As one moved south, land became less expensive. In the Carolinas, before the intrusion of the land speculation companies, it was almost free except for government fees if purchased from the proprietors. All seven of the Carolina proprietors save one (Sir George Carteret) sold their proprietary interests in 1729 to the Crown for ₤50,000. Carteret maintained the patent to an East-West strip of land 66 miles wide (North to South) theoretically from sea to sea through the interior.Many of the Scots-Irish and German immigrants that arrived late in the process of land acquisition with little money moved through the settled areas to the frontier where they simply squatted on the land. It has been estimated that two of every three acres occupied on the frontiers were held with no legal rights other than the improvements made on them. Many families had a roof over their heads and were debt free, but they were also essentially penniless.A free white immigrant of little wealth could obtain a good deal of land in British North America through the implementation of the headright, an allotment of land based on the number of people in a household including slaves and servants. This system was usually sponsored either by the colonial governments themselves to increase settlement or by agents of the land speculation companies to which land had been granted. Under the concept of headright some colonies allowed a freeholder to claim up to 150 acres of land for himself, and he might include a similar amount for his wife and children, and 20 acres for each male slave, and 10 acres for each female slave in his household. Headrights were often extended to indentured servants after they had served out their time. The limits of these allowances seem to have become more narrow as the 18th century progressed. Although historians have only a poor understanding of the operational details of the headright system, it seems to have been effective, despite a good deal of corruption, in getting land into private hands.Even though the land granted under the headright system was ostensibly free, the paperwork required by government was expensive. The whole granting process probably cost the average small farmer several months’ net earnings in terms of fees, but in Royal colonies it was not possible to obtain legal title to land simply by squatting on it. The cost of the land patent application alone was about ₤12 for any tract of less than one square mile (640 acres).The governor received 10s; the governor's secretary got 5s; the colonial secretary's office got 1s 5d; the clerk of the Court of Claims got a 1s for his trouble (equivalent to an open bribe for expediting the process) and another 7s 6d for the petition; the auditor was entitled to ₤3 for entering the patent in his records; the attorney general received ₤2 for examining the patent to be certain that the wording was correct and that the title was clearly and accurately conveyed; and the colonial secretary charged ₤5 for having written out the original patent and 10s for his trouble (another bribe). The fees—all in coin—had to be paid in order to obtain clear title to vacant land. New owners could thereafter sell the land or devolve the land to their heirs absolutely at their pleasure and without consultation with government officials.[i][i] Margaret F. Hofmann, “The land grant process in North Carolina,” The Colony of North Carolina, 1735-1764. Accessed June 2011, URL: The Land Grant Process In North CarolinaSee:Amazon.com: The Boston Tea Party: The Foundations of Revolution eBook: James Volo: Kindle Store