New York Land Grants: Some History Until The American Revolution

Land policy in colonial times in what is now New York State favored nobility and prominent men with connections to the Crown. This involved several countries (The Netherlands, England, and France), several explorers, several early pioneers, and appointed officials who oversaw the disbursement of land by land grants or patents.

Patents are land and privileges granted to one or more persons by the British crown or, later, by the state of New York. Proprietors were joint owners of a patent, who then often surveyed, subdivided and sold individual allotments.

Patents are not deeds conveying land from one person to another, they are official grants to individuals and early corporations from government entities. Atlases and deeds today still refer to boundaries of these old land patents.

Exploration and Settlement

When “explorers” of land (already well-known to Indigenous people) had royal sponsors, this meant that the monarch owned the land the “discovered.”

Suffice it to say that no land instrument surveys and few maps existed during the period of contact between Indigenous people and European explorers, traders, and settlers. No metes and bounds for land deeds or indentures were available. Eventually, early maps and charts showed the east coast and were partially accurate but needed cartographers to perfect the charts and maps.

Each nation had to formulate a policy as to how the new lands would be described and governed, and with whom they would trade. The actions of Kings and Queens tried to fit these settlements into their broader ideas about mercantilism. Mercantilism basically called for the colonies to exist, prosper and be solely for the economic gains of the Mother country – England.

The monarchs, when their explorer-agents claimed lands, would usually grant large chunks of the land, sometimes from coast to coast. Some grants went from the Atlantic to the Pacific. Explorer-proprietors were granted various levels of judicial and executive powers.

For example, take John Cabot, a native of Venice, but sailing for England explored the northeast coast of North America in the early 1500s. The King issued a directive to Cabot and his three sons “to find, discover and investigate whatsoever islands, countries, regions or provinces of heathens and infidels, in whatsoever part of the world placed, which before this time were unknown to all Christians.”

Cabot, and many others granted these powers, could subdue and occupy any land and community to which they laid claim for the monarch.

Missionary and mercantile interests also brought European manufactured items such as metal tools along with guns, and intoxicants such as rum. Most treaty conferences featured those items as incentives for Indigenous people to bargain and give up land peacefully.

The Dutch interest however, was mainly centered around trade and commerce. The grantee in this case, the Dutch West India Company, sought to monopolize trade with Indigenous people (especially fur).

Settlement was not initially important and trading with Indigenous people was prohibited reserved to the Company, but from the earliest settlements along the Hudson and Mohawk Rivers many freemen turned from farming to the fur trade.

In New Netherland the Dutch had a great port and a long navigable river, the Hudson River, to move into the Indigenous territory, particularly important in the absence of roads in the 16th and 17th centuries. By 1614 Fort Nassau, on an island, became the first outpost.

That year the Dutch Estates-General had chartered the New Netherland Company (and in 1621 the Dutch West India Company) with exclusive privileges which allowed for trade with Indigenous people and the purchase of their land, and for minimal settlement. In 1624, 18 Walloon families arrived in at Fort Orange (Beverwyck, now Albany), adjacent to old Fort Nassau, and the prominent Dutch soon established manors.

The Algonquian-speaking Mohican and Iroquois-speaking Mohawk lived in what became the Albany-Schenectady-Troy area. The Mohawk ultimately became the primary trading partner of the Dutch.

The Charter of Freedoms and Exemptions of 1629 allowed the Dutch West India Company to start granting title to members of the corporation. As John H. French described in his 1860 Gazetteer of the State of New York “These inducements to foster colonization and settlement (also known as the “Rights and Exemptions”) are the basis for the patroon system.”

In 1629 Killaen Van Rensselaer was granted the Manor of Rensselaerswyck in exchange aiding in settlement. It included most of Albany, Rensselaer, Greene, and Columbia counties. Fort Orange, became the center of the Dutch fur trade.

Arendt van Curler sailed to New Netherland in 1637 at the age of 18 and worked on his great uncle Kiliaen van Rensselear’s manor project. In 1661 he petitioned then Governor Peter Stuyvesant to settle on the Great Flatt with six to eight families, which became the initial settling of Schenectady, the first major European outpost in Indigenous territory outside Fort Orange.

Van Curler received a deed from the Mohawks for “six hundred hands of good wheyte Wampun, six koates of duffels, thirty bars of Lead, and nine bags of gun powder.”

The quasi-feudal tendency in New York land policy history came from the Dutch, and the great landlords preferred leases to tenants to outright purchases.

English Control

After the English took over the New Netherland colony and renamed it New York, a fundamental principle of English law applied: that the King is the original owner of all lands in his realm, including the colonies, and that title to that land may be received only from the crown through the colonial governor.

This tended to restrict settlement, even into the later 18th century. Several historians have noted that the population of New York Colony (96,000 in 1756) as well as the amount of land populated stood far behind other colonies such as Pennsylvania (220,000 in 1756). Frontier uncertainty and sometimes danger, and grant favoritism among the gentry and nobility worked to keep settlers from land ownership.

Richard Nicolls (1624-1672), who served as the first English colonial governor of New York Province between 1664 and 1668, encouraged establishing manors (the 160,000-acre Livingston Manor was established in 1668) and independent patents. The property rights (with the exception of rights to some common property) and laws of inheritance of the formerly Dutch colonists were guaranteed.

Before 1700 the governor issued patents or grants with consent of Indigenous counsel. This proved to be a source of graft and corruption as the governors gave away huge tracts of land to their friends and relatives.

Large manors granted during this time include Robert Livingston’s (Livingston Manor) in Columbia County, est. 1668; John Pell Pelham’s (Pelham Manor) in southeastern Westchester County, est. 1687; Col. Stephanus Cortland’s Manor (Cortlandt Manor) in northern Westchester County, est. 1697; and Caleb Heatcote’s Scarsdale Manor of Caleb Heatcote, May 21, 1701 in Westchester County.

Three-fourths of the land in the colony was owned by only 10 or 11 men in 1683, according to Governor Bellmont (Richard Coote, 1st Earl of Bellomont, The Lord Coote, 1636-1700/01).  Bellemont had been a prominent Williamite during the Glorious Revolution and the main financial backer of Captain William Kidd before turning against him.

Benjamim Fletcher, eventually fired for his associations with piracy, served as Governor between 1692 and 1697 and, according to Daniel E. Wager’s history of Oneida County, Our County and its People; a descriptive work on Oneida county, New York (Boston History Co., New York: 1896), it was due to “the rascality practiced in his five years of maladministration that attention was called to the looseness of the process.”

Some estimated that during Fletcher’s governorship 30 persons owned 75% of the province. One example of the extravagance of the period was a grant from Fletcher to Captain John Evans (1694, surveyed 1797) who acquired 40 miles by 20 miles west of the Hudson River at New Paltz, Ulster County.

Fourteen grants between 1685 and 1706 included all of what is now Dutchess and Putnam counties.

Between 1702 and 1708 Governor Cornbury (Viscount Cornbury, Edward Hyde, 3rd Earl of Clarendon, 1661-1723) continued the tradition of extravagant grants. Cadwallader Colden (1688-1776, acting Governor 1760-1765) said that Lord Cornbury’s grants “equaled those of all his predecessors put together.”

During that time, the process for obtaining a grant allowed for devious and illegal procedures. About 1,700 grants such as these were eventually annulled in the English courts and more strict rules adopted to limit land grants to 2,000 acres and later 1,000 acres, but grants continued throughout the colonial period.

Colonial governors made land grants to themselves as they would grant to several favored individuals and add their own names to the grant.

Among Cornbury’s grants was the 1705 Oriskany Patent, which covered the area around the Mohawk River and Wood Creek, dubbed the Great Carry or the Carrying Place (now Rome, NY). It consisted of 32,515 acres.

Patentees of the Oriskany Patent in were five close friends of Cornbury: George Clarke, royal secretary to the New York Colony, Peter Schuyler, a member of the Colonial council, Thomas Wenham, a British colonel, Peter Fauconnier, receiver of customs in the city of New York, and Roger Mompeson, chief justice of the colony.

In 1734 after the crown secured Indian deeds and the Surveyor General surveyed the tract encompassing much of the city of Utica on both sides of the Mohawk River. This 43,000 acre tract became property of Governor William Cosby and his friends.

George Clarke was acting Governor from 1736 until 1743. At the time of his death in 1759 death he owned land and buildings in England plus the 40,000 acre Nine Partners Patent in Dutchess County, one half of the Cory Patent of 25,000 in Schoharie and Montgomery counties, one half of the Outhoudt Patent of 13,00 acres in Otsego County, a third of four other tracts in Delaware and Otsego counties, half of Cherry Valley Patent of 7,000  acres, a quarter of a Patent in Greene County near Catskill, lands in what is now Vermont and also lands in what is now Fulton and Washington for a total of some 60,000 acres.

In 1761 Major Philip Skene received 25,000 acres and an additional 9,000 acres in today’s Whitehall, Washington County.  Skene’s trading schooner became one of the first ships of the US Navy and was sailed to Crown Point, armed, and used by Benedict Arnold to capture a British Enterprise on May 18, 1775.

One feature of the land system was the quit-rent. Quit rent is a tax or land tax imposed on occupants of freehold or leased land in lieu of services to a higher landowning authority, such as a manor owner, government or their assigns.

Many land grants in colonial America in the 17th and 18th centuries carried quit rent, a  practice utilized by the New York manors. The feudal notion of land-tenure, that the soil belonged to the crown, who collected the feudal dues in the form of quit-rents or transferred this right to proprietors, was carried to the New World in all the early charters.

One person owning so much land kept settlement low and owners of the manors generally leased their lands and so their settlers did not generally own the land on which they lived and worked, a situation which would eventually lead to the Anti-Rent War.

By the time of the American Revolution large landowners still controlled much of the land in what is now New York State.

Note: Patents and indexes are on microfilm at the New York State Archives. Patents are indexed by grantee name (see series A4684, A4685) and location (see series A4686, A4687). You can see a map of them here.

Illustrations, from above: “Map of the tracts, patents and land grants of northern New York,” 1894 (New York Public Library); “Early Land Grants” map of New England and Virginia (Library of Congress); a map of Livingston Manor and Rensselaerwyck in 1777; a map of Livingston Manor, 1714 (New York Public Library, see a larger version here); and an alleged portrait of Lord Cornbury, wearing a dress, artist unknown, painted sometime between 1705 and 1750. Lord Cornbury died in the 1720s, making it possible the portrait was posthumous. It resembles a similar portrait that hangs in the New-York Historical Society (courtesy Dallas Museum of Art).

This essay was drawn from Richard L. Williams, Oneida County Land Patents with Special Emphasis on the Coxe Patent (2021), available at the Oneida County History Center. John Warren contributed to this essay.