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Show 44 HISTORY OF PUBLIC LAND LAW DEVELOPMENT of the granting process, retained no right of quitrents, made grants of townships to groups of proprietors, and reserved lots for the minister, the church, and the school. Most characteristic and unique was the group grant to proprietors. These persons, six to perhaps 80 in number, were men of affairs, known and acceptable to the legislative assembly. In the 17th century the proprietors generally planned to move to the new community they were creating and to identify themselves with it. As a group having the full ownership of an area, 6 miles square in the later years, they promoted development by building roads, offering free grants to the first settlers and to those who would construct sawmills and gristmills, and gave bounties for the production of wheat, rye, and corn. After making free grants to aid in getting the community started and allotting land to those proprietors who moved to and developed homes in the new community, the proprietors held the balance of the land or commons for future sales. Conflicts developed between the proprietors who had rights in the commons and later settlers who had no such rights. The townships were surveyed in advance of settlement and divided into lots or sections with in-lots, or residential lots, and out-lots, or land for cultivation, pasture, and woods. The lots or sections were numbered in a fairly regular plan from the outset and took on some of the aspects of the Federal township of a later day.33 The township method of granting land kept the control over settlement and settlers in the hands of the legislature, permitted a more compact advance into the frontier, and was a factor contributing to more systematic and intensive utilization of the land. Individual squatters and speculators who traveled widely looking for choice land were not to be found. 33 John W. Reps, The Making of Urban America (Princeton, N. J., 1965), pp. 116 ff., shows a number of New England town plats. Some of the numerous town histories of New England include maps and plats showing the original division of the towns. In the early days this system of township grants to a more or less homogeneous group of proprietors-with similar backgrounds, a common religion, a concern for each other's welfare, and a willingness to exchange labor and share the use of draft animals and tools- resulted in a very different type of community from that emerging on the frontier of Virginia or North Carolina. Reservations or allotments for the church, the minister, and the school assured residents that religious and educational opportunities would be available fairly soon after the new community was established. The church was sometimes built by the proprietors as an added inducement to settlement, and the minister might be enticed by the promise of a lot of 160 acres. School lots were an indication of the high place common schools held in the minds of New England town proprietors. The British Board of Trade, impressed by the success of Massachusetts and New Hampshire in establishing frontier towns for protection against the Indians, ordered South Carolina and Nova Scotia to settle groups in frontier townships of 20,000 acres and to grant heads of families settling in such communities 50 acres for each member.34 Virginia, Pennsylvania, Maryland, New York, and Georgia also experimented with colonizing hardy settlers on the frontier and made efforts to eliminate speculation in the generous grants given for this purpose, but the colonists always seemed to find means of evading the restrictions.35 In the years just before and after the Revolution, speculation in township grants and proprietors' rights in Vermont ran riot. The overlapping claims of Massachusetts, New Hampshire, and New York led to duplication of grants, bitter struggles between settlers and proprietors claiming under grants 34 Leonard W. Labaree, Royal Instructions to British Colonial Governors, 1670-1776 (2 vols.; New York, 1935), II, 542. 35 Harris, op. cit., pp. 261-62. |