Land ownership's influence on early America
JULY 2007 - At the time the United States was founded a significant factor driving real estate use and development in the new nation was the evolution of individual land ownership. According to former NAR historian Pearl Janet Davies land ownership “had become both a legal fact and a fervent general individual ambition” for Americans.
In 18th Century Europe land was rarely owned by the people who worked it or lived on it. The possibility of land ownership brought many colonists to America and according to Davies was a large part of why the Revolutionary War was fought. Among the grievances spelled out in the Declaration of Independence was the Crown’s “raising the conditions of new appropriations of lands.” Land ownership determined the social structure in early America and heavily influenced politics. Davies wrote “the great step toward a modern world was taken when ownership of the land shifted from the Lord Proprietor or the colonizing company to the individual. That was the step that made America.”
At the end of the Revolution over 90 percent of the population lived outside the cities and land grants were the easiest way to pay veterans. The ex-soldiers and their families moved across the Alleghenies and began to populate what was then called the “Northwest Territory,” today’s states of Ohio, Indiana and Michigan as well as Tennessee and Kentucky.
