COLONY OF NORTH CAROLINA 1765 - 1775 364 pg. 201 SAMUEL ELDERIDGE 30 October 1765 80 acres in Johnston on the S. side of Mill Creek, joining Elderidges own land, the run of Bushes Branch, and the run of the creek which is Elderidges old line. 2379 pg. 555 NATHAN WILLIAMS 9 April 1770 100 acres in Johnston on the W. side of Bushes Branch of Mill Creek, joining SAMUEL ELDRAGE, Bushes Line, WM. BUSH, and the side of the sd. branch. 4098 pg. 159 SAMUEL ELDREDGE 22 January 1773 100 acres in Johnston on the S. side of Mill Creek and in the fork of Maple Branch. FOREWORD Publication of this volume completes Margaret Hofmann's abstracts of grants of patents for land in North Carolina throughout the colonial period, from 1663 through 1775, whether issued by the governor and council under authority of the Lords Proprietors of Carolina (1663-1729) or under authority of King George I, King George II, or King George III (1729-1775). There remains only one other group of records conveying original title to land in colonial North Carolina, and abstracts of those are in preparations by Ms. Hofmann. That group is the body of indented deeds issued out of the proprietary land office of John Carteret, Earl Granville, from 1748 until his death in 1763; they are commonly called "Granville Grants." In the foreword to the volume of these abstracts for the years 1735 through 1764, the user's attention was called to the fact that after 1744 Crown patents were not issued for land that lay within the Granville Proprietay. At the risk of appearing repetitious or pedantic, one feels obliged to emphasize once more the fact that in this present volume the resarcher will not find record of instruments of original title to land in the Granville Proprietary. This district comprised the northern half of North Carolina and included all land lying between the Virginia boundary and the southern boundary of the present counties of Dare, Tyrrell, Washington, Randolph, Davidson, Rowan, and Iredell. Theoretically, the eastern and western boundaries of Lord Granville's tract were formed by the two oceans. For all practical purposes, had that title to be made good, the earl probably could have established his western boundary only at the Mississippi River. The researcher will not, then, find in this volume any titles to land in Northampton County, for example, or Wilkes, or Yadkin, or Davie, or Burke, or any other present day county that lay within the old boundaries of the Granville Proprietary. This does not mean, let me hasten to say, that researchers will not find names of patentees who lived within the Granville Proprietary but obtained grants within the Crown district in he southern half of North Carolina. One did not have to reside in either half of the province in order to own land there. Some individuals owned enormous landholdings in both districts. A greater number lived first in one district, then in the other, and owned land in both Lord Granville's district and in the Crown's district. Easily available, relatively inexpensive, vacant land is a powerful motivator; it is frequently the underlying force in the movement of population. Conversely, a well-stocked geographical territory is a continuing desideratum of governments and proprietaries. Both the Crown and Earl Granville desired a well-populated district. The opening of Lord Granville's land office in 1748 obliged the governor of North Carolina to introduce changes in the operation of the Crown land office, since both districts were in competition for the same market. We, therefore, see influences and alterations in the methods of operation of the Crown land office that it may be useful to speak of specifically. From the earliest days of the Lords Proprietores it ws usually possible to secure land only by immigrating or by importing immigrants (called "headrights"). So much land was granted per headright -- usually 100 acres per adult male, and vaying amounts of females, children, and slaves. Land was seldom sold by the Lords Proprietors for mere cash. The Crown officers continued the headright system of granting land upon importation of settlers and payment of surveyro's and office fees. The headright system was dealt a severe blow from which it never recovered when the Granville land office opened. Lord Granville's agents sold land outright to any purchaser with ready money and did not concern themselves with headrights. The system of granting land in the Crown's district as a reward for immigrating or for importing immigrants appears to have been allowed to lapse just prior to or with the death of Governor Gabriel Johnston (1752). The royal instructions to Governor Arthur Dobbs, dated 17 June 1754, stipulated merely that land be granted to persons who were "in a condition to cultivate and improve the same by settling thereon in proportion to the quantity of acres a sufficient number of white persons or negroes." Surveyors' fees and office fees were still charged by the Crown to the settlers, and an annual quitrent (a form of tax) was reserved to the Crown, of course. The grants of patent abstracted in this present volume, then, do not represent "headright" grants, and researchers should be careful not to speculate on the size of families by applying to these grants an old headright formula of so many acres per person imported. Great caution must be used, as well, in attempting to deduce inferences about economic well-being of the patentee by the size of his grant. While it is true that the criterion for grants was altered from headrights to "a condition to cultivate and improve" the land that the settler wanted, there is another factor at work in determining the size of the tract granted. In the eastern end of the province, there was naturally less desirable vacant land in the second half of the eighteenth century than there was in the more recently and more sparsely populated western end of the province, where there was an expanding frontier. One should expect to find, and will find, therefore, a great number of grants for small tracts in the eastern counties that have no bearing on the patentee's economic condition. In addition to abandoning the headright system, Crown officers made improvements in their land office. In the earliest years all applications for vacant land were made directly to the Provincial Secretary who brought the fact of the "entries" to meetings of the governor and council sitting as a Court of Claims. Initially the Crown continued this method of making an "entry" for lands after it had purchased the soil of North Carolina from the Lords Proprietors of Carolina. When Earl Granville's land office opened in 1748, however, his agents rode the court circuit and made themselves readily available throughout the northern half of the province to any who wished to make an "entry" directly with them. The Crown land office did not immediately adopt this convenience of making the entry takers more readily accessible to enteres, but within five years of the closing of the Granville land office (1763), additional entry takers were commissioned to assist the Provincial Secretary by taking the initial entry and forwarding it to him. The Provincial Secretary then presented the entry at the Court of Claims. (The ordinary steps of issuing a warrant to the surveyor authorizing him to lay off the land, his return to the Provincial Secretary of a plat map of the tract of land, and the issuance of a patent out of the Provincial Secretary's office under the signature of the Governor and the great seal of North Carolina all remained in force and were not altered.) Probably the major factors influencing the addition of more entry takers in the Crown land office were the growth of the population in the southern half of the province, the expansion of the western frontier by Cherokee Indian land cessions in 1768, and the increase in the Crown's land office business due to the unavailability of grants through Lord Granville's land office after his death in 1763. By 1768, the year of the Cherokee cessions which led to the formation of Tryon County and the opening of the Catawba, Pacolet, and Tyger river lands, the Crown's land office divided the southern half of the province into three geographical districts (Western, Northern, and Southern) and appointed sub-entry takers. The Western district initially included Mecklenburg and Tryon counties, and Martin Phifer was the entry taker; by 1773 John Kirconnel was made entry taker for Tyron County, where there was a booming land office business. The Northern district included Craven, Dobbs, Carteret, Hyde, and Beaufort counties and that portion of Johnston County that lay below the Granville line; Christopher Neale was entry taker in 1768, and by 1773 he had been succeeded by Peter Johnston (at which time Onslow County was added to the district). The Southern district remained the responsibility of the Provincial Secretary and included the counties of Duplin, New Hanover, Brunswick, Bladen, Cumberland, and Anson; initially Onslow County fell into the district. By 1773 the land office business in Anson had become so brisk that James Cotten was commissioned entry taker for that county. This final appointment put individual entry takers in the three western counties of Anson, Mecklenburg, and Tryon, and in those appointments lies a useful hint concerning the growing density of the frontier population on the eve of the American Revolution. The greater part of this growth can probably be dated from the Cherokee Indian cession of 1768, under which the Indians surrendered title to land lying west of the Catawba River and east of the foothills of the Appalachian Mountains. (It was in this area that Tryon County was formed.) The southern line of Tryon County was meant to be the North Carolina-South boundary. This however, had never been surveyed. When it was surveyed in 1772, North Carolina agreed to a line that placed the southern strip of Tryon County and much of the Pacolet and Tyger river lands in South Carolina. Consequently, a large number of patents abstracted in this volume represent the instrument from which devolve a very large number of present-day South Carolina land titles. It is not known to what extent the closing of the Crown's land office motivated North Carolinians to join in the rebellion that was the American Revolution, but it certainly must have been one of the moving forces. By order of the King in Council dated 7 April 1773, Governor Josiah Martin was ordered to close the land office. Accordingly, the land office closed in North Carolina on 28 June 1773, when the order was received and read to the council of state. Although the Court of Claims continued to sit, and although patents based on old entries, warrants, and surveys continued to ripen and were issued as late as 25 July 1774, applications for new entries and warrants were denied. Rumor spread through the province that it was the Crown's intention to secure an Act of Parliament that would vacate all American titles to land by annulling former patents, thereby causing all titles to land to revert to the Crown. Governor Martin issued a proclamation to suppress this rumor. He even went so far as to hold another Court of Claims in February 1775 in which 74 petitions for patents were accepted. It was too late. The Crown land office had closed forever. When the land office reopened in 1778, it opened as the State land office under authority of a sovereign people who had assumed title in themselves to all vacant lands within their charted boundaries. The question occasionally arises as to whether or not North Carolina emulated South Carolina after the American Revolution by requiring citizens to present memorials setting forth their land titles. North Carolina did not do this. It accepted the fact that natural title to vacant land vested originally in the chartered proprietor or sovereign power, whether the Lords Proprietors of Carolina or the kings of Great Britain. It merely held that in 1775 title to all vacant lands within its boundaries had demised on the new state upon the cessation of the king's sovereignty within those boundaries. North Carolina allowed no question to shake earlier titles; she held her citizens secure in their lands. In the preparation of this volume, as in her volumes of abstracts for the years from 1663 through 1729 and from 1735 through 1764, the compiler has consulted (and where necessary, conflated) the patent books in the office of the Secretary of State in Raleigh, the Auditor General's record of patents in the British Public Record Office in London, the Provincial Auditor's records of patents in the North Carolina State Archives and the Secretary of State's office in Raleigh, and the records of the colonial Court of Claims in the North Carolina State Archives. (The minutes of the closing years of the Court of Claims, from 1772 through 1775, are not with their fellows in the Archives but are in the Southern Historical Collection at the University of North Carolina Library in Chapel Hill, where they have been assigned the collection number of 2145.) Researchers who wish to obtain copies of the original abstracts of patents or copies of the warrants an d plats for them should address their inquiries to the Land Grant Office, New Legislative Office Building -- Room 302, 300 North Salisbury Street, Raleigh, North Carolina 27611. Perhaps writers of forewords should not praise the books they intend to introduce. But to say that this volume is another milestone in opening to researchers the single most important goup of records in North Carolina is no more than to acknowledge what is a self-evident truth. And to say that Margaret Hofmann has placed the world of researchers irretrievably in her debt is mere understatment. George Stevenson Reference Unit Supervisor North Carolina State Archives Raleigh, North Carolina June 1984 Source: "Colony of North Carolina 1765-1775, Abstracts of Land Patents, Volume Two" by Margaret M. Hofmann. ============================================================