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.