John Blankenbaker's Germanna History Notes

Note 285

Not all things that I am discussing concerning the home of the Second Germanna Colony occurred in a logical sequence.  The thing that I will write about in this note, the 40,000 acre tract taken up by Alexander Spotswood, William Beverley, and other unnamed partners, should have occurred earlier.  But because I did not have a plotting program, the actual study of the 40,000 acre tract came after the decision about the location of the home.

The program that I used, DeedMapper (TM) was created by a Germanna descendant, Steve Broyles.  It makes it reasonable to plot large tracts such as the 40,000 acre patent (but it is equally useful for small plots).  The patent, with its metes and bounds, is described in two patents which read almost identically (Virginia Patent Book 11, p. 145 and Book 14, p. 378).  With a description running to pages, the plotting would be difficult without the benefit of DeedMapper.

The question to be answered was whether the patent included the area where I believed the first home of the Second Colony was located.  On the first plotting, there was a moment of disappointment as the patent did not seem to close properly.  Since the patent started on the south side of the Rapidan River, just a short distance up from Germanna, and closed on the north side, it was very important to have these details correct as this was the area in question.  (The total perimeter runs for about 50 miles.)

The problem was that the last legs seemed to fall short by about three miles.  As such, the area in question would have been outside the tract.  But the look of the plotting would tell one that the description was in error.  Also, the patent referred to German Run and the description in the patent did not bring the bounds up to German Run.  Believing in the simplest explanation possible, I found that one simple error could account for the trouble.  One distance was too short by 1000 poles (close to three miles).  Apparently, one digit had been dropped in describing the length of one side.  This digit just happened to be a "1" in the thousands position of the number of poles in one length (one pole equals 16.5 feet).  Perhaps the copyist overlooked it; it is extremely unusual to have a length more than 999 poles.  With the correction made, the plot looks very reasonable all the way around.

To the point here, the tract does include the first home of the Second Colony.  Strangely, while the tract comes close to the Germanna tract, it does not border on it.  I have not yet found who took up the intervening land.

One by-product of the plotting is that I discovered that the 40,000 acre tract was near to 65,000 acres.  That is a big error and the surveyors were capable of better work than that.  I am inclined to believe that Spotswood had the tract described as smaller than it was.

(I am the "caretaker" of John Blankenbaker's "Short Notes on Germanna History", and also the List Administrator of the GERMANNA_COLONIES mailing list at RootsWeb.  Ocassionally, a subscriber to the mailing list will offer an additional view, or even a differing view, of a subject in one of John's "Notes".  Such was the case after Note Nr. 285 was posted.  Worth S. Anderson sent the following and I think it important enough to add here to the bottom of John's Note. George W. Durman, aka "SgtGeorge".)

Actually, I'd suspect the opposite -- that the warrant was for 40,000 acres, but that with the collusion of a possibly venal surveyor Spotswood managed to obtain a survey containing far more acreage.   When the supply of land seemed virtually endless, surveyors would frequently throw in, sub rosa, a few "extra" acres while preparing surveys of grants for their friends.   For those not already friends with the surveyor, something might be arranged for some extra compensation on the side.   Land-grabbing was already an old Virginia practice when Spotswood got there.

As time went on, the too-largely-surveyed tract might be sold off in pieces.  In a few generations a family might be living on land to which they believed they had valid title, but the entirety of which had, in fact, never been granted.   Or the land might have been granted to someone else, with the state believing the land was vacant.   Or surveys may have overlapped inadvertantly.   Or fraud and forgery might have cropped up.   By the 19th century these problems caused an explosion of litigation over land titles.  See Lawrence M. Friedman, "A History of American Law" (2nd ed. 1975), p. 241 ("Title became as vexatious and intractable a subject as the abolished law of tenure.   Nobody planned it that way.   But sometimes the chain of title had defective or mysterious links.   It depended, perhaps, on the terms of some vast, ambiguous grant -- from the federal government, or the King of Spain, or some long-dead proprietor.   Or it had to take into account the patents (grants) of American state governments, possibly equivocal, possibly corrupt.")

A new unscrupulous generation sometimes benefitted from the unscrupulousness of earlier generations.   Sharp operators would search land records, looking for places where the description of the land in the grants did not match up with the land actually occupied.   Such operators would then obtain the theoretically "vacant" land and bring a trespass suit against the occupant.  The occupant might be evicted, and lose all improvements on the land (house, barn, crops, etc.) or the occupant might be extorted to buy at an exorbitant price land he believed was already his.   The usefulness as a defense of the doctrine of adverse possession (to grossly oversimplify, the idea that squatting can ripen into title after a number of years) might be limited where the land had theoretically remained in the public domain.

The author O. Henry (William Sydney Porter) wrote a wonderful, wonderful short story, "Georgia's Ruling", that deals with precisely this topic.   It was originally published in his book, "Whirligigs" and is available in any number of compilations of his works.

Worth S. Anderson
wsa@crosslink.net