Descriptive Summary

Administrative Information

Access Restrictions

An appointment for research is required. No Interlibrary Loan.

Copyright Notice

The collection is protected by the Copyright Law of the United States (Title 17, U. S. C.). Reproductions are made only for use as personal study or research. It is the user's responsibility to verify copyright ownership and to obtain all necessary permissions prior to the reproduction, publication, or other use of any portion of these materials. Appalachian State University owns copyright for materials generated by the Justice family.

Preferred Citation

[Identification of item], Collection 124: Speculation Land Company Records, W. L. Eury Appalachian Collection, Appalachian State University, Boone, North Carolina, 28608.

Provenance

This collection was donated to the W.L. Eury Appalachian Collection by the Justice family, Agnes W. Justice, Alice M. Justice, Janette J. Griffin, and Caroline J. Dessouky, in 2001 and 2002.

Processing Inf.ormation

Processed in July 2002. Finding aid revised, 2010

Biographical Note

Speculation land was unclaimed land siezed large British landowners or owned by the Crown following the Revolutionary War. The established policy for unclaimed lands was that any settler could claim up to 640 acres to settle or resale for profit, plus 100 acres each for a wife and children, or purchase land in excess of 640 acres for approximately 10 cents per acre. Claimants intending to resale the land were known as land speculators. Before land could be sold, North Carolina state law required it to be mapped out by surveyors in a four-step process. For an individual to buy a plot of land, they had to submit a petition for a warrant for the land to be surveyed, with a vague description of the property and its size. The warrant was reviewed and usually passed on to a court-appointed surveyor, who then, for a fee, surveyed the land with more precision, establishing its boundaries with preexisting property lines, streams, trees, or other geographical features, and submitted the resulting survey and handdrawn map to the county and state for recording. The state then issued a patent for the land, after which the ownership title could be officially changed.

New York-based speculator Tench Coxe (1755-1824) came into possession of 400,000 acres of land in North Carolina following the Revolutionary War, much purchased from the Rutherford Land Company in North Carolina, in 1791 and established the Speculation Land Company to manage and sell the land. The Speculation Land Company was one of the largest land owners in southwestern North Carolina during the eighteenth through the early twentieth century, owning thousands of acres in Buncombe, Henderson, Polk, Rutherford, and Mecklenburg counties in North Carolina. Later owners and trustees included Pierre Etienne DuPonceau and Abraham Kintzig, Isaac Bronson and Goold Hoyt, James J. Hoyt, William G. Ward, John Ward, William Redmond, Jr., Francis Randall, Francis M. Scott, David A. Thompson, George Willett Van Nest and William Redmond Cross. The local agents were based in Rutherfordton, North Carolina. Many of the claims were handled by Company Agent Joshua Forman in the 19th century, and much of the surveying records were created by the Justice family. By 1910, over 927 deeds had been distributed. In 1913, the descendants of the original Speculation Land Company sued for changes in the proceeds distribution, and in 1930, the Speculation Land Company was dissolved.

Thomas Butler Justice (1813-1892) was a Rutherford County Baptist minister and a surveyor. He and his wife Harriet Bailey had several children: C. Baylis (b. 1836), James (b. 1838), Mary (b. 1840), Michael (b. 1844), William (b. 1846).

C. Baylis Justice was a Baptist minister and surveyor, and surveyed many Speculation Lands prior to being certified. Decades later, this led to concern about potential legal challenges. He and his wife Eliza (died 1906) had six children: James (b. 1863), Mills (b. 1867), Andrew (b. 1869), Thomas (b. 1872), William (b. 1875), and Eliza (b. 1879). In Hendersonville, Butler Justice's nephew Samuel (b. 1851) and great nephew George W. (b. 1878) operated a surveying company named Justice and Son, which performed many surveys for Speculation Land Company claims.

Scope and Content Note

This collection contains records from the North Carolina branch of the Speculation Land Company of New York, New York, which sold and leased real estate in southwestern North Carolina counties, including Rutherford, Polk and Henderson. The local agents were based in Rutherfordton, North Carolina, and operated mostly by the Justice family. This collection illustrates its administrative model, land holdings, and mineral rights polici es.Documents include land deeds, surveys, land plats, record books, business checks, business and personal letters, and one photograph. Some correspondence relates to the ministries of Thomas Butler and Baylis Justice. Some materials include signatures of national and North Carolina personalities such as Nathaniel Alexander, Samuel Ashe, Thomas Bragg, and U. S. President Martin Van Buren.

Collection Arrangement

This collection was originally unorganized and required extensive cleaning and an artificial arrangement. The arrangement is based primarily on document type and then county.

Series Description

Series I, Field Books, 1775 - 1932, consists of hand bound, handwritten field books which include surveys of land plats, check receipts, lists of delinquent purchasers and actions taken. Untitled Book 15 includes some of T. B. Justice's family accounts. Books generally include dates, names of buyers and associated people, land patent numbers, and survey notes.

Series II, Land Documents, 1796 - 1924, includes documents gathered and created by surveyors and government officials during the creation of land plots, arranging them for sale, and sales. Speculators had to go through a four-step system to sell land in North Carolina, including petitioning for a warrant for survey (often a vague narrative of the land with a sketch or plat), the warrant would be gien to a court-appointed surveyor, who would make a more detailed description of the land with boundaries (often trees, streams, or other geographical features), directions, degrees, and would include a plat (map). The individual purchaser would have to pay a set fee per acre to the surveyor, who would submit a statement recording that the fee had been paid. The survey and land warrant would be submitted to the county and state governments, where it would be recorded, usually in bound volumes, and then a patent would be issued to the individual, allowing the land parcel to be purchased. This series includes the surveyor's copies of the documents, including surveys, fee payment statements, checks, plats, correspondence, land agreements, deeds, and patents.

Series II is organized into six subseries. Subseries A, Patents (formerly "packets"), includes materials gathered during the process of establishing land patents (official property designations necessary before the land could be sold), and contains land deeds, correspondence, and handwritten surveys combined by Speculation Land agents. Documents are organized by patent numbers, and some supporting documents (correspondence, surveys) without patent numbers are organized by date. They include correspondence, land costs and land surveys. Patent files include correspondence, land deeds, agreements, surveys with plats (drawings or sketches of the area in question), signed contracts concerning land grants in North Carolina, surveyor fees per acre, and legal documents when the land changed hands or was petitioned for resale. At the end of the subseries there are a small amount of unidentified papers with no patent numbers, and a list of land plots, their patent numbers, owners, and costs, and an index to land contracts by patent numbers, including a list of names of landowners on each patent.

Series II, Subseries B, Land Surveys, contains handwritten surveys with coordinates, geographic features, and sometimes a small drawing of the land. It is organized by patent numbers, or,when there are no clear patent numbers or the numbers overlap, by date. Surveys use 19th century survey methodology such as measuring by chain lengths and using trees as corners.

Series II, Subseries C, Land Plats, contains drawings of land boundaries and features, and sometimes is located on the survey itself. Some plats are tinted with water colors and include surveyors notes and symbols. They are organized by county.

Materials Note

Documents date from the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries and are in varying states of fragility. Some documents may not be safely handled directly.

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