Holland Land Company
The four houses soon expanded to six when they were joined by Willem Willink and Rutger Jan Schimmelpenninck in 1792, and established shares for the Holland Land Company in 1795.
[1][3] Morris was a signatory of the Declaration of Independence and a financier of the American Revolution, and at the time was the richest man in America.
[16] He kept one parcel of 500,000 acres (2,000 km2) for himself in a tract 12 miles (19 km) wide and running the breadth of Western New York from Lake Ontario to the Pennsylvania, known as the Morris Reserve.
[1] This was achieved at the 1797 Treaty of Big Tree, executed on the Genesee River near modern-day Geneseo, south of Rochester, New York.
[1] Representatives of the Holland Land Company, Robert Morris's son Thomas, the Senecas, and a commissioner for the United States named Jeremiah Wadsworth gathered at Big Tree in August, 1797 and negotiations began.
[17] Chiefs and Sachems present included Red Jacket, Cornplanter, Governor Blacksnake, Farmer's Brother and about 50 others.
In 1802, the boundaries of the Cattaraugus Reservation were adjusted and a strip of Seneca lands along the Niagara River was acquired by the company.
[18] In 1798, the New York Legislature, with the assistance of Aaron Burr,[19] authorized aliens to hold land directly, and the trustees conveyed the Holland Purchase to the real owners.
Busti was a native of Milan who had made his career in Amsterdam where he married Elizabeth May, a sister-in-law of one of the syndicate members, Isaac ten Cate.
Vanderkemp succeeded Busti as Agent General after his death in 1824 and served until the liquidation of the Holland Land Companies assets in the 1840s.
They located subagents in Mayville in 1810, Ellicottville in 1818, Buffalo in 1826,[2] Meadville, Instanter (a small village of German settlers in McKean County, Pennsylvania), two districts in Eastern Alleghany, Lancaster, Cazenovia, and Barneveld.
[7] The company struggled to sell its Pennsylvania lands, which were unsuitable for farming and today remain sparsely populated.
Tension between the company and the residents of Western New York began almost immediately due to the structure of the land sales.
The Dutch investors had instructed for land to be sold for $2.75 per acre with a down payment of one-quarter to one-third its value, but it soon became apparent to Ellicott and the other agents that these prices were unaffordable to nearly all of the arriving settlers, some of whom were entirely cashless.
As a result, conditional sales were made ad hoc by the agents, involving discounted prices, lower down payments, longer mortgages, or labor from the settlers on the company's behalf.
[2][7] The company worked on several investments to local infrastructure to make the land more profitable and attractive, including roads, irrigation systems, canals, and mills.
[9] In the 1830s, after years of petitions from Western New Yorkers, the New York legislature passed a law taxing debts due to foreign landowners, targeted specifically at the company.
[10][30] In 1838, after Ogden's death, the company was party to the Second Treaty of Buffalo Creek for all of the remaining Iroquois lands in New York, which was ratified but was also disputed as fraudulent.
[12][31] In 1856, agents of the company were successfully sued by Seneca John Blacksmith for forcibly evicting him from his sawmill in Fellows v.
