From 1789 to 1796, Georgia governors George Walton, Edward Telfair, and George Mathews, while in office, made gifts of land grants covering more than three times as much land as Georgia then contained.
The land was portrayed as fertile when in reality it was a pine barren.
[1] The Pine Barrens speculation is often conflated with the Yazoo land scandal, which occurred at about the same time and dealt with land in present-day Alabama and Mississippi.
[1] In the Yazoo case, the Georgia legislature authorized sales of millions of acres of land at low prices, to enable speculation by political insiders.
It led to a landmark United States Supreme Court decision in 1810, Fletcher v. Peck.