Thanks to those who responded
to my questions about the "townships" of Frugality,
Enterprise, etc. The leads to the literature on the John Brown
Tract will be very helpful to me.
One person asked (offline) if
I could provide a link to De Witt's maps showing these tracts.
Here is a link to his 1802 map at the Library of Congress: http://hdl.loc.gov/loc.gmd/g3800.ct001270. His 1804 map can be
found by searching the same site.
Two people (one offline)
pointed out that these surveyed tracts are not, strictly speaking,
"townships," which have no legal existence in New York.
This would apply not only to these quadrilateral parcels in the John
Brown Tract, but to similar parcels in the New Military Tract, the
Phelps and Gorham Purchase, the Holland Purchase, and elsewhere.
It should be pointed out in response that these land parcels are
usually referred to as townships in the historical
literature--probably because there is no other good word to describe
them.
This raises some other
interesting questions. Were these tracts sometimes
described as "townships" by New Yorkers prior to ca. 1830?
I note that De Witt describes many of these tracts as "Town
of..." or "T. of..." on his 1802 map. But the
example of modern day Tompkins County indicates a complicated
relationship between these tracts and the towns that were later
created in the area. Modern Tompkins County is made up mostly of
the old tracts of Ulysses and Dryden (with maybe portions of
neighboring tracts). But De Witt also shows a "T. of
Ulysses" which encompasses parts of both Ulysses and Dryden
tracts. The article on Tompkins County in the Encyclopedia of
New York shows the Town of Ulysses (founded 1794) as still existing,
along with the Town of Dryden (1803), along with seven other towns
incorporated between 1811 and 1821.
This makes me wonder:
What was the legal status of the land in these survey tracts prior to
their incorporation? How were tracts converted into towns?
What legislation controlled the creation and governance of towns
between 1790 and 1830? Has anything been written about this
subject? The more you learn, the more you discover that you
don't know.
David Allen
Encinitas, CA
Get a sneak peek of the all-new AOL.com.
Towns
in the state were created under the Towns Law of 1777. The
relationship is really pretty straightforward: Towns were set
aside in the New Military Tract and elsewhere, and within them there
might be hamlets, unincorporated entities, incorporated villages, and
even cities.
Modern
Tompkins County, established in 1818, contains 1/2 of the Town of
Milton (now the Town of Lansing), 1/2 of the Town of Locke (now
the Town of Groton), the whole of the Town of Dryden, the whole
of the Town of Ulysses, which was split into three units, thereby
creating the town of Ithaca (with the village of Ithaca established in
1821; later the City of Ithaca 1888) , and the town of
Enfield, leaving a portion as the Town of Ulysses within which,
Trumansburg became the major village. The remainder of
Tompkins County came from the Watkins and Flint Purchase resulting in
the towns of Danby, Newfield, and Caroline.
In
Tompkins County the word townships has not been used. People
from New England, familiar with the term township, who came into New
York often referred to these town units as townships; New Yorkers have
generally used the term towns. On my copy of the 1804 De Witt
map, Ulysses and Dryden are separate and do not overlap. On the
1929 Burr Atlas map of Tompkins County it is easy to see that what
began as the Town of Ulysses had become three towns. Ithaca was
designated as the county seat in 1817.
Prior
to the Revolutionary War, the land that became the New Military Tract
was Iroquoia.
Carol Kammen
Tompkins County Historian