John Brown’s Tract

The land comprising today’s Adirondacks was removed from the possession of the Haudenosaunee in the years immediately preceding and the years immediately following the American Revolution. The vast majority of the Adirondacks was then purchased by land speculators who hoped to resell the property at a profit to other speculators who might or might not be able to resell it to settlers. 

 

The first of these great land grabs occurred in 1771. In the Totten & Crossfield Purchase, the English Crown took title to a triangular plot of about 1,115,000 acres in the central Adirondacks from the Mohawk Nation and then for a hefty fee granted title to a group of investors. The Totten and Crossfield land speculators arranged to have the land surveyed and subdivided into 50 numbered townships. 

 

The investors took possession of some of the new townships and began to sell the others. Before all of the townships were sold, the colonies went to war with England putting a temporary end to their dealings. Following the victory of the colonies, the Totten and Crossfield Purchase was invalidated by the newly formed State of New York which seized the lands of all English loyalists. Some of the Totten and Crossfield purchasers petitioned the New York State legislature to retain their titles, claiming they had supported the Revolution. Many of these petitions were successful, resulting in the State reaffirming title to those lands. The remainder of the Totten and Crossfield Purchase became the property of New York State.

 

On May 5, 1786 the New York State legislature created a land commission charged with procuring speedy sale of all unoccupied state lands. After some initial sales, the commission was unable to find purchasers for most of the land it held in the Adirondacks. Finally, in May of 1791, Alexander Macomb applied to the state land commission for the right to purchase 3,635,200 acres in the North Country. Macomb offered to pay eight pence per acre, approximately twelve cents in today’s money, or a total of about half a million dollars. Dubbed the Macomb Purchase, it encompassed most of present-day St. Lawrence, Franklin, and Jefferson counties, all of Lewis and parts of Herkimer and Oswego counties. The land commission agreed to divide the purchase into six Great Tracts each estimated to be about 640,000 acres. Macomb was to receive title to each Great Tract as he made payment. Lacking other bids, the land commission approved Macomb’s application on June 22, 1791.

 

Over the next year Macomb raised enough money to pay for three of the Great Tracts but his involvement in a questionable banking scheme soon left him deeply in debt. By the summer of 1792 Macomb was bankrupt and headed for debtor’s prison. William Constable, one of Macomb’s silent partners, took over and completed the purchase. Constable spent the next few years selling large plots to other land speculators both in America and abroad. Only six months after obtaining title, he sold a large portion of the property to Samuel Ward, a banker, better than doubling his money in the process. 

 

On November 25, 1794, Samuel Ward sold a significant parcel of the southeastern portion of his section of the Macomb Purchase, consisting of 210,000 acres, to James Greenleaf, son of a wealthy Boston merchant. Much of the upper Beaver River was included in the tract Ward sold to Greenleaf. Unfortunately, during 1795 Greenleaf’s financial dealings did not go well. In an attempt to meet his debts, on July 29, 1795, Greenleaf mortgaged his 210,000 acres of wilderness land to Philip Livingston, an influential New York merchant and a signer of the Declaration of Independence.

 

Greenleaf had a number of other commercial interests, one of which involved selling tea imported from China. On July 30, 1795 he purchased a warehouse full of tea, 420,000 pounds in all, for the sum of $157,500 from the Providence, Rhode Island shipping firm of Brown & Francis. Greenleaf paid with three promissory notes each for $52,500. To guarantee full payment, he also gave Brown & Francis a second mortgage on his Adirondack lands. John Francis died November 4, 1796, leaving the matter to be settled by his business partner, John Brown.

 

Over the next two years, John Brown tried unsuccessfully to collect on the Greenleaf promissory notes. By 1798, Brown concluded that the only way he would ever collect on the debt was to foreclose on his second mortgage and take possession of the Adirondack tract. Brown then learned that Philip Livingston had already reached the same conclusion and filed for foreclosure of his first mortgage the prior spring. Brown sought legal advice on this matter from Aaron Burr but later hired Alexander Hamilton to handle foreclosure of the Greenleaf mortgage. Hamilton was successful in negotiating with Livingston. On December 29, 1798, Brown became the sole owner of the 210,000 Adirondack acres that would come to be called John Brown’s Tract.

 

Brown believed he would never see any profit from this purchase unless he could credibly show the land was fit for settlement. He had the land surveyed and divided into eight townships, which he named for Protestant virtues in hopes the names would attract conscientious settlers. Township No. 1 [Industry] was divided into 160-acre farms. No. 2 [Enterprise] and No. 3 [Perseverance] were divided into plots a half-mile square. The other Townships were undivided. They were: No. 4 [Unanimity], No. 5 [Frugality], No. 6 [Sobriety], No. 7 [Economy] and No. 8. [Regularity]. The upper Beaver River flows through the western portion of Brown’s Tract in Townships No. 5 and No. 4.

 

For the rest of his life Brown devised various methods to encourage settlement of Township No. 7, where the hamlet of Old Forge is located today. Despite considerable effort and expenditure all these plans failed. The few settlers Brown lured to the area soon left for better land elsewhere. At the time of his death following a carriage accident on September 20, 1803, Brown had failed to start a permanent settlement anywhere on Brown’s Tract. Details about Brown’s efforts to settle the tract can be found in Joseph F. Grady, The Adirondacks, Fulton Chain – Big Moose Region: The Story of a Wilderness (1933), pp. 13 - 55.