Early land transactions in Central and Western New York were carried out on a vast scale unimaginable to today’s real estate agents. Following the Revolutionary War, state governments were desperate for cash and flush with immense tracts of sparsely inhabited land, which they were willing to sell for pennies per acre. This allowed wealthy entrepreneurs to engage in a frenzy of land speculation in the immediate post-war era. As a result of this frenzy, the title to the 3.3 million acres that constitute Western New York, running from the Genesee River Westward to Lake Erie, came into the hands of a consortium of 12 men from six Dutch banking houses in 1792. Known collectively as the Holland Land Company, they bought the tract that became Western New York for 32 cents per acre from the wealthy Philadelphian Robert Morris, who had previously purchased it from two Massachusetts land speculators, Oliver Phelps and Nathaniel Gorham. Phelps and Gorham had initially purchased it for 3 cents per acre from the Commonwealth of Massachusetts.

The Company’s marketing strategy was formulated by a strapping, six-foot, three-inch Pennsylvanian named Joseph Ellicott. Described as reserved, hardworking, meticulous and forthright, Ellicott had learned the surveying trade from his brother Andrew when they were hired by New York State to locate its western boundary in 1789. Nine years later, in 1798, he was hired by the Dutch to lead the “Great Survey” of the Holland Land Company’s lands. Ellicott supervised a gang of 150 surveyors in laying out the township, section and lot lines within the Holland Purchase, delineations which are still used in Western New York surveys today. When the Great Survey ended in 1800, Joseph was retained to be the Holland Land Company’s permanent Resident Agent in Western New York. The first Holland Land Office was located in Asa Ransom’s tavern in Clarence Hollow, where the first land sales took place in 1801. The price was $2.50 per acre. Ellicott, however, soon moved the land office to Batavia, the county seat of a massive Genesee County that then included all of Western New York.

Acting as the chief intermediary between the pioneer settlers and his Dutch bosses, Ellicott applied his knowledge of pioneer character and capabilities to guide his land agency policies. According to Patrick Weissand, former director of the Holland Land Office Museum, Ellicott realized that sales would be easy and collections difficult, but that, in theory, “by selling land to poor landless families, they would work hard clearing and developing the land, Western New York would cease to be the frontier, and land values throughout the purchase would increase.” This would be to the benefit of the Holland Land Company as they sold land at higher prices to later customers over the years. Just how long it would take this policy of first wave/second wave settlement to be successful, if ever it would be, remained to be seen.   

Under a system of conditional sales initiated by Ellicott, down payments were amazingly flexible. Newcomers were allowed to take a lot of 150 acres with little or no cash down and usually given six months to make some improvement, whether they cleared the land for pasture or built a cabin. Similar leniency was extended to repayment financing. Holland Land Company policy was ostensibly to sell land on credit with an eight-to-ten-year payback period. In reality, payback rates were often significantly lower than expected and payback periods stretched out indefinitely. A classic example of this was the case of Abel Brunson, who arrived in Stocton from Connecticut in 1809.  Delivering extremely small payments to the land office on foot as soon as he had the funds available, Brunson took 20 years to pay off his original debt of $300.

There was a good reason for the scarcity of cash in Chautauqua region. In the early 1800s, throughout most of the 1,000 square miles of Chautauqua County there were no roads capable of taking farm products to a distant market. Timothy Dwight detailed his 1804 journey through the region: “The stumps and roots were innumerable, and singularly perplexing and dangerous.” He continued, “The mud, through most of the district was knee-deep, and often so stiff as to make it impossible for a horse to extract himself without extreme labor.” Another traveler, John Maude, summed up the situation tersely, saying, “excellent land, execrable roads.” As a result, profitable, large-scale agricultural markets remained out of reach and Chautauqua farmers remained relatively poor and only marginally self-sufficient.

Eventually markets did emerge, ones that would take advantage of the forests and waterways of the region. Given the subsistence nature of the early homesteads, the ax quickly replaced the plow as the main implement for deriving cash income. Trees were felled and large rafts of softwood pine were floated on the Conewango Creek and Allegheny River to lumber mills in Warren and Pittsburgh, PA, where lumber brought seven dollars per thousand linear feet. Most of the hardwood of Chautauqua was consumed in the ash trade.

As lands were cleared of their hardwood trees, huge piles of trunks, limbs and branches accumulated in the fields. These were burned in massive bonfires. The resultant ashes were leached by pouring water through them. The effluent was called lye, and the lye was boiled in iron pots until the cooled lumps were as hard as stone. This was potash, which was used in the manufacture of glass. It was broken up and packed into barrels for shipment downriver to the glass factories at Pittsburgh. 

Another ash product was produced when the lye was not boiled off to dryness, but was kept a black sticky mass. This “black salt” was placed into brick ovens and baked until gray in color. Cooled, this material turned a pearly white and was called pearl ash or saleratus. A tiny amount was used locally as baking powder and in soap production. Large amounts were shipped from Dunkirk harbor to Black Rock, hauled by land around Niagara Falls to Lewiston and then shipped across Lake Ontario to the Canadian shore. Shipments were then taken overland to Montreal and sailed down the Saint Lawrence to the Atlantic and then to Europe. Large-scale uses of this product were in the tanning, wool-treating, soap manufacturing and brewing industries.

Despite this fear, actual evictions were rare events due to company leniency. In some years, Joseph Ellicott received cattle and wheat as partial payment. He suffered, however, with the same problem as the settlers—lack of a cash market—so this was a losing proposition for the company. Unfortunately for Ellicott and the Holland Land Company, as the years progressed much of the goodwill these lenient gestures may have engendered seemed to evaporate because of contravening forces. One factor that contributed to a simmering anger on the part of some settlers was the use of land contracts that required payment in full before the deed and, therefore, title to the land was transferred to the purchaser. This policy ran counter to the practice back east where traditionally deed and, therefore, title were transferred upon down payment. The settlers were essentially tenants and not freeholders and it rankled some who saw this as an unwarranted deferment of proud land ownership. 

Another source of friction was Ellicott’s practice of frequently ameliorating cash demand by writing labor clauses into the land contracts. This meant he accelerated the construction of mills and provided road maintenance throughout the purchase through the use of settlers’ labor. Although this lowered the required payments due to the company, some settlers resented this work, especially the road work that seemed never ending. Also, despite Ellicott’s practice of cutting new roads through the wilderness, they were practically impossible to maintain in a useable state. The failure of these roads was wrongly laid at Joseph Ellicott’s feet. It didn’t help that the state levied a road tax on the settlers for the “maintenance” of worthless roads while by state law non-resident landowners were exempted from that duty. The largest non-resident landowner was the Holland Land Company, and the settlers understood this. 

In 1819, popular sentiment openly turned against the Holland Land Company and Joseph Ellicott. Anonymous articles condemning the company suddenly appeared in the Niagara Journal.  Complaints were that the company was overcharging for land, that cash was flowing from the purchase to Holland and that the company was exempt from the state’s road tax. Some residents of Niagara County met at Cook’s tavern to draft a petition demanding that the state levy a tax on non-residents’ land for road maintenance costs. Circulated throughout the Holland Purchase, the petition garnered 1,300 signatures. That petition effort failed, but in 1821, a weary and disillusioned Joseph Ellicott was forced to resign. His physical and mental health deteriorated over his remaining years and he was committed to an asylum by his family. In 1826, Joseph Ellicott, master surveyor and settlers’ friend, hanged himself.

By now, it was clear that Ellicott’s first wave/second wave strategy and leniency policies had failed the Holland Land Company. The 1826 fiscal report showed $6 million in outstanding debt on the purchase and only $120,000 in collections, one-fiftieth of the amount due. Ellicott’s successor as resident agent, a Philadelphia businessman named Jacob S. Otto, was less forgiving and more demanding in his debt collecting efforts. That triggered a second wave of protest meetings, held in Lockport and Buffalo in 1827. Petitions were sent to Albany, which were successful in fostering the passage of a non-residents’ land taxation law, a massive monetary blow to the Holland Land Company.    

Otto died suddenly and a new resident agent, David E. Evans, took over. Under Evans, all settlers were given one year to renew old contracts. The principal was reduced on these contracts if the tenant paid one-eighth of the new price. In addition, the company agreed to set aside more money for improving and opening roads, with the work to be done by the settlers and payment applied to their debts. 

This plan was heartily accepted by most settlers, who thronged the land offices to renew their contracts. The company collected $300,000. Attacks, however, seemed unending and both sides were caught in a vicious cycle of thrust and counter-thrust. An 1830 meeting in Buffalo demanded that the state tax the land debts due to non-residents. The 1833 session of the state legislature complied, passing a law to tax the debts due to foreign landowners. It was then necessary for the company to reduce those debts as soon as possible. Notices were sent out warning that, unless back interests were paid, the contracts would end and land would be taken back. 

Nearly 3,000 settlers paid back interest and $250,000 flowed into the company’s coffers. Newly issued contracts now stipulated, however, that settlers pay the tax on the debt. An 1834 settlers’ meeting in Buffalo condemned the company for giving up its lenient policies. In 1835, a group of five settlers brought suit in the United States District Court in Albany questioning the Holland Land Company’s ownership of the Holland Land Purchase land. The suit was a victory for the company, whose title was now secured by legal judgment. The company then took measures to evict troublesome tenants.

That same year, the Holland Land Company decided to end its adventure in Western New York land speculation. They would sell out. Throughout the summer and fall of 1835 the company sold the land and debts of the three “most troublesome” townships to the New York Life Insurance and Trust Company. By December 1835, large sections of the remaining land and debt were marketed to other business groups, including the Farmers Loan and Trust Company, which purchased lands and debts in Orleans, Niagara, Genesee and Erie Counties. 

The Chautauqua County land and debt package was purchased by two Batavia businessmen, Trumbull Cary and George Lay. As rumors of a sellout spread, anxiety gripped the settlers. They feared worse demands by the new owners and suddenly realized how lenient the Holland Land Company really had been. Many contacted the company to plead against a sellout or rushed to the offices to pay off their debts and secure their deeds. But it was too late. The selloff had been consummated and the new owners began demanding contract renewals, which incorporated rate increases of $1 to $3 per acre and an uncompromising ten-year payback period.

In 1810, the Holland Land Company had built a subsidiary land office in Mayville, the county seat of the recently formed Chautauqua County. The company then hired William Peacock to be its Chautauqua County land agent. A taciturn New York City native, Peacock had surveyed the Mayville area under Joseph Ellicott. When Cary and Lay purchased the title to the Chautauqua lands in 1835, Peacock was retained as land agent for that company while rumors of the sellout circulated. In December 1835, a committee of Chautauqua settlers hastened to Batavia and returned with the news that Cary and Lay would mount a re-contracting campaign demanding $1 to $2.50 per acre rate increases, with renewals granted only upon cash payment of one-fourth of the new principal and a repayment schedule of only five years duration. A second committee then approached William Peacock in an attempt to bargain at the local level. The uncommunicative land agent turned them away.

On February 6, 1836, a large number of outraged Chautauqua settlers—variously numbered between three and five hundred participants—met at Barnhart’s Inn at Hartfield. There Roland Cobb of Gerry and retired General George T. Camp attempted to dissuade the group from its violent intentions. Unpersuaded, the mob marched for Mayville under the leadership of an old-time settler named Nathen Cheney and an Allegheny riverboat pilot from Charlotte, George Van Pelt, carrying crowbars and axes. They arrived at the land office around 8 p.m. The ensuing event has been described in detail in the History of Chautauqua County, New York, and Its People (1921):  

Cheney in a strong voice then gave the order to strike, which was obeyed and all the windows came out with a crash. The door was broken down, and an entrance to the building was affected. A costly clock was disposed of by the blow of an ax. A valuable map of the county, upon which every farm was delineated, was destroyed. The axe men made light work of the furniture and woodwork. They cut the posts and canted the building over. They found some difficulty in opening the vault that contained the safe, which was made of solid mason work of cut stone. Van Pelt pried out the keystone with an iron bar….The iron safe enclosed was pried open, and half a cord of books and papers of the company were taken out, placed on a sleigh and carried to Hartfield, where a bonfire was made, and they were burned.

Fortunately, there were duplicate documents located in the Batavia Holland Land Company office. Just before the Mayville land riot, Cary and Lay had taken on another partner, William H. Seward, an ambitious and successful lawyer from Auburn. Shocked by the riot in Mayville, Cary and Lay pressed their new partner into service as their resident agent in Chautauqua County after William Peacock fled to Erie, PA. Fearing further violence in Mayville, Seward set up shop in Westfield, where the citizens promised to protect him. He then instituted a regime of palliative measures in his land dealings with the Chautauqua settlers. These included the waiving of imminent foreclosures, reduced interest and principle payments and the easing of deed (and therefore title) transfers to the settlers. Again, the History of Chautauqua County, New York, and Its People has preserved Seward’s own words:

Thus prepared, I opened an office and invited the settlers to liquidate their debts and quiet all alarm….In less than eighteen months, four thousand persons who I found occupying lands chiefly under expired and legally forfeited contracts of sale, and excited and embarrassed alike by the oppression and uncertainty of ever obtaining titles…became freeholders—upon the terms at their own option, either of payment of their purchase money or payment of a convenient portion thereof, and a credit of five years for the residue. When the occupant could not pay an advance…his contract, no matter how long expired, was renewed without any payment. It was always, as you well know, a principle of my agency that no man could lose his land by forfeiture….There was none so poor that he could not secure his ‘farm and his fireside.’” 

These remedies were accepted wholeheartedly by the settlers. And so, an age characterized by optimism, despair and turmoil in Chautauqua County ended on a relatively peaceful note. In 1838, William H. Seward, the man who quieted Chautauqua, became the Governor of New York and then a U.S. Senator in 1849. He would be better known later in his career as Abraham Lincoln’s Secretary of State and the man who oversaw the purchase of “Seward’s Folly”—Alaska. In 1844, the last Holland Land Company claim in what had been “the Purchase” was finally liquidated.